Sunday, November 30, 2003

Japanese web celeb rabbit "Oolong" now has a successor
Remember that website where the guy in Japan took totally cute daily snapshots of his beloved bunny named Oolong, and remember how Oolong passed away, and he took snapshots of his rabbit's death that were so sincere they just made you want to cry right into your keyboard? I may be the last blog-obsessed geek to learn, but the guy has a new, and equally photogenic rabbit named Yuebing ("moon-cake") Brace yourself for more really cute rabbit photos. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:09:01 PM permanent link to this entry

Female blogger's first-person sex column causes ruckus in China
NY Times piece on 25-year-old Chinese blogger Mu Zimei, whose sexually explicit first-person accounts have generated controversy -- and celebrity -- for the former magazine columnist. Snip:

What changed everything was her decision in April to start her own online blog at a new Chinese site for personal diaries. She said she thought it would be fun. While writing her magazine column, she had hopped from man to man, sometimes hopping to two men at once, sometimes hopping to married men. Her topics, though, remained more thematic than explicit.

But in her online diary, she began writing explicitly about these encounters, or those of her friends, and on July 26 described her brief and apparently unsatisfying liaison outside a restaurant with a famous guitarist in a Guangzhou rock band. The entry was posted at a popular online discussion board, spread among China's "netizens" like wildfire and was quickly picked up in the gossipy newspapers that feed China's growing celebrity culture. Eventually, she was featured in China's edition of Cosmopolitan magazine.

"Rodney-King-like" citizen phonecam episode
BoingBoing pal Emily says:

A blatant act of racism by the Portland police was snapped by a "citizen reporter" armed with a camera phone. The story and the photos were published in the Portland Tribune and broadcasted on television: "Police offers parked their car outside Ringlers restaurant with a stuffed gorilla attached to the car's grill last Tuesday night, - where a largely black crowd had gathered for a weekly hip-hop show hosted by disc jockey Mello Cee. This is the kind of thing you expect to see in the South, like a Confederate flag. They might as well paint their faces black with white lips," said Mello Cee.

"Resident Calvin Washington who said he took the photos around 1 a.m. last Tuesday morning outside Ringlers restaurant at 1332 W. Burnside St. Washington said when he realized what was happening, he grabbed his cell phone camera and walked outside to take pictures. 'I went out and flicked a few pics. The police couldn't tell what I was doing because I had the phone in my hand. They couldn't tell what it was,' he said."

The Portland Tribune published a follow-up article on Friday, questioning whether the "incident may have launched the age of technological vigilantism in Portland".

Deborah Iyall of Romeo Void sells new print on eBay
Debora Iyall -- artist, Native American cultural activist, and former front-woman for new wave band Romeo Void-- is selling this linocut on eBay to benefit People for the American Way. She says:

"[I wanted] to visually address recent events and the role of the Supreme Court. Where have all our freedoms gone? The foundation of our nation is based on broken treaties. A stack of money energizes the book of law. Apache helicopters circle overhead as the Supreme Court loiters around a river of death, the Court which allowed George W. Bush to assume the office of President of the United States of America in 2000. A soldier strides toward battlefield while a woman pulls a cart of produce. Hummers roll by. Mortar rounds flank the scene and a bear witnesses."

Roy Disney resigns from Disney, slams Eisner
Roy Disney has resigned from the Disney Board of Directors, and has sent a scathing email to Michael Eisner explaining, in exorciating detail, exactly why he's leaving the company his uncle founded.

1. The failure to bring back ABC Prime Time from the ratings abyss it has been in for years and your inability to program successfully the ABC Family Channel. Both of these failures have had, and I believe will continue to have, significant adverse impact on shareholder value.

2. Your consistent micro-management of everyone around you with the resulting loss of morale throughout the Company.

3. The timidity of your investments in our theme park business. At Disney's California Adventure, Paris and now in Hong Kong, you have tried to build parks "on the cheap" and they show it and the attendance figures reflect it.

ipodsdirtysecret.com's dirty secret
The guy who donated bandwidth to ipodsdirtysecret.com (about two brothers who spraypainted complaints about lousy batteries on iPod posters) is pissed a plenty:

"Jesus, I cannot BELIEVE you guys. In good faith, I put the video back on the basis of the email you sent me, hoping that at least some people would click on the mirror link at at least get the truth, and information about how to replace the battery. Instead, you removed the mirror link entirely, used the bandwidth and resources that I was providing you exclusively on your front page, AGAIN without providing ANY information whatsoever about how users can solve this problem, or the fact that Apple now has an official $99 battery replacement, and on top of it all, put ThruPort's banner on the front page! I've now served 91,629 downloads for you, for over 0.6 terabytes of data transfer. What the f*** is you guys' problem? I guess that fact that you are liars shouldn't surprise me, since that's exactly what your whole site and the video is. Have fun with it, and whatever f***ed up satisfaction you get from having as many people as possible see your video, and not even wanting to tell people that there is a solution."

San Francisco's homelessness quagmire
The San Francisco Chronicle has begun a five-part series on the incredible homeless problem in SF. Thousands of homeless people live on San Francisco's streets, in straits as dire as anything you can imagine in the worst slums of the developing world, amid some of the wealthiest people in the world. It's a crisis that no one seems to know how to solve, and that San Franciscans have, by and large come to accept as an unchangeable fact of life. The first installment, "Homeless Island," is a gripping account of the knot of beggars who live and die on a downtown traffic island, holding up heartbreaking signs and shooting heroin into infected veins, waiting to die from flesh-eating bacteria. It's like a tour of hell.

"Day clinics? Jail? You think anyone out here on the street, all over this city, can stick with that?" Tommy said weeks before he died. "Why the hell do you think we're out here? Because we can't get over what's going on with us by ourselves, that's why.

"We want to get off the street, but I got to tell you true," he said. "Unless they take people like us and put us somewhere where we can't keep f -- ing up, we're going to keep f -- ing up."

Retro-feel travel accessories
Flight 001 is a chi-chi luggage-and-travel-accessory boutique, with retro-style Pan-Am-logo bags and such. I'm particularily fond of the airline-safety-card-print wallets, passport-sleeves and etc. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:10:48 AM permanent link to this entry

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Journey Thru Innerspace lives again in 3D animation
A trufan of the sadly defunct Journey Thru Innerspace ride from Disneyland's Tomorrowland has recreated the ride as a 3D model and is publishing stills and flythroughs of the textured mesh. Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:40:32 PM permanent link to this entry

Dishonest anti-bootleg DVD ad
The UK-based Federation Against Copyright Theft is running ads in UK newsmags that warn:

BEAT THE CON MEN

To ensure your complete enjoyment, don't be persuarded to buy fake DVDs -- especially pre-release copies. Pirate DVDs are a rip-off, with poor sound and picture quality. Even if the packaging looks convincing, you will probably be disappointed with the contents. Avoid being conned by con men. You can report any suspicious activity in confidence to the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) on 0845 6034567. Copyright is a matter of FACT.

It's all well and good for FACT to pursue its goals of convincing Britons to buy licensed discs instead of bootlegs, but this ad is pretty intellectually dishonest. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:56:45 PM permanent link to this entry

Eroticising trademarked battlemechs
ScoutWalker is a novel form of Star Wars porn: giant AT-ST Walkers engaged in scenes from the Kama Sutra. Link (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:45:23 PM permanent link to this entry

DNA sequencing for children
Discovery toys is selling an $80 toy called the DNA Explorer, which allows small children to extract and sequence the DNA from a variety of foodstuffs. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:40:52 PM permanent link to this entry

Turing paper into ASCII
Gary Wolf has a wonderful feature in this month's Wired about the parallel efforts to put texts, indices and images of books on the net (and to render them in cheap wood-pulp substrate) from the Internet Bookmobile to the Amazon Search Inside the Book system:

Kahle is happy to sidestep the problem of digitizing commercially successful books. He has no wish to antagonize the publishing industry. What he hates is that the Million Book Project cannot legally digitize countless books that aren't generating money for anybody. US libraries hold about 30 million unique volumes. No one knows how many of those books continue to be protected by copyright or are available from commercial publishers. Still, Kahle says, "they can't be digitized because the copyrights can't be cleared, and the copyrights can't be cleared because it's too much work to identify the copyright holders. Some people call them abandonware. I call them orphans."

"Amazon is taking a cut at the commercially available titles," continues Kahle. "We are going for the public domain titles. But who is taking care of the orphans? Nobody."

Aussie passports get animated kangaroos
The new Australian passports have an anti-counterfeiting laser-generated image of a kangaroo that hops up and down when you change your viewing-angle. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:54:02 PM permanent link to this entry

Labels detect and display fruit-ripeness
A new labelling technology foor fruit senses the ripeness of the underlying comestible and changes color accordingly:

The system, developed at the Horticulture and Food Research Institute of New Zealand, uses a punnet that traps the volatile compounds fruit emit. As the fruit ripen, the colour of the label changes in response to changing concentrations of these compounds.

Since pears need to soften before they achieve their best flavour, shoppers often squeeze the fruit to test them, which can damage them, says Ron Henzell, who led the research team.

Replace storage with the bag it came in.
Anti-static plastic, the kind used in RAM envelopes and other component-wrappers, is an excellent candidate for high-density storage. Reminds me of the Lily Tomlin bit: "I bought a garbage can and brought it home in a plastic bag. When I got there, I put the bag in the can."

Any device resulting from their work would be a "write-once, read-many" format and could perhaps be used to store films or music.

The researchers speculate that very dense memory blocks could be created by stacking the thin layers of the material on top of each other.

They team estimates that working devices could be up to 10 times more dense than current hard disks.

Custom crocheted laptop sleeves
For 60 Euros (and up), avant-gardge Viennese artist Evelyn Fürlinger will hand-crochet you a custom laptop sleeve with a design of your choosing: I'm especially fond of the red go-faster stripes. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:34 PM permanent link to this entry

Lockers create love hotel loyalty
According to Joi Ito, Japanese love-hotels have lowered churn and increased customer loyalty by adding storage lockers, because:

Married couples found it convenient to store adult toys and other things that they didn't want their children to find in these lockers. These lockers created a relationship between the customer and the hotel and dramatically increased customer retention. Now these lockers are used to store all sorts of "Not Safe For Home" things.

P2Pnets: where deleted documents are reborn
Matt Jones posted a strategy document he'd his co-workers had written for the BBC, his then-employer, on his blog. They asked him to take it down. As is inevitably the case when this happens, people are coming by and posting to the comments section, asking where the document can be had. Turns out, it's circulating on Kazaa. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:52:31 AM permanent link to this entry

Friday, November 28, 2003

Big Mouth Billy Bass runs Linux, does impressions
Now that the antimated talking fish doll Big Mouth Billy Bass is out of fashion and can be had at pennies on the dollar, why not try your hand at installing Linux on it and getting it to lipsynch funny Simpsons quotes or act as the phyical avatar for someone at the other end of a teleconference line?

We will make the following improvements to Big Mouth Billy Bass.

* User defined audio clips
* Lip syncing
* Video recording
* Audio recording

By adding this functionality to the bass, in addition to networking protocols, the bass will be transformed into an H.323 compliant video teleconferencing host. It will be possible to use Microsoft NetMeeting or CUSeeMe to connect to your bass at home and talk with your loved one ones!

Thursday, November 27, 2003

Microsoft prepares to launch new moblogging services?
On the "Microsoft Windows Mobile Communities" site, this blurb:

Get Ready for Moblogs -- Turn an ordinary blog into a moblog by including pictures from your Pocket PC or Smartphone. Check back here in December to learn how to create yours.

Vietnam Veterans' art online
This online gallery features a portion of the works in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, which contains works in various media created by vets from around the US. At left: "Ambush Behind a Thin Wood Line," by John Plunkett:

"Our home base sat at the foot of the only mountain range for about a hundred miles. It consisted of two mountains: Nui Ba Den and Nui Ba Ra. These paintings are from a diary that was written in my brain and in the brains of thousands of others, on a daily basis in Vietnam. Some of the situations did happen to me; others were bad dreams, fears of what might happen, hallucinations; images that seemed to appear out of nowhere, for no reason."

Persian blogger runs for parliament in Iran
Hossein Derakhshan, Toronto-based pioneer of the Persian blogosphere, just announced he's running for Iranian parliament. Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine says:

In the comments, Sassan worries that this will put Hossein in jeopardy. I fear his incredible activities online could do that as well. But if he merely tries to run -- even if from afar, even if not allowed to, even if unable to campaign or win -- sends a most powerful message: Here is a man who has created a new political power base online. We've joked about a blogger running for office in the U.S. Hoder is doing it. We've joked about starting a revolution online. Hoder has done it. I pray that Hoder does nothing to put himself at risk. But I stand in awe of what he has accomplished.

Red Riding Hood dances with DDD-breasted fursuits video
In this TV commercial for a Japanese construction firm, Little Red Riding Hood dances with huge-titted and generously-testicled furry woodland creatures. Link (via diepunyhumans)

update: Jed says, " "Here are eight more ads from this company (with heavily overlapping elements in some of them; the first two are particularly similar). Also, here is more info and a translation, plus a transcription of the lyrics. It seems that the theme of the ad is 'expansion.' And more translation here.

At any rate, the other thing worth noting on that last page is that the raccoon with the giant testicles is actually a tanuki, apparently a raccoon-like nature spirit. Or else actually a raccoon, depending on which source you believe. It's been speculated that Totoro is part tanuki, and there's another Studio Ghibli movie (not directed by Miyazaki) that features tanuki more directly/prominently. And that's more than enough digression for one site suggestion, so I'll stop now."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:44:41 PM permanent link to this entry

Mood-recognition coming to Playstation
The next-gen Sony Playstation will have an optical sensor built in for gesture and facial recognition, and is indended to allow for affective game-design that detects and responds to players' emotional states. Link (via Wonderland)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:13:59 AM permanent link to this entry

Big Thunder Mountain broken by negligence
Looks like the fatal crash on Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain was the result of poor maintenance. Disneyland's maintenance has been suffering ever since a group of McKinsey and ex-McKinsey consultants advised them to save money by cutting back on preventative maintenance and forcing out experienced, senior cast-members. Management consultants: is there anything they can't screw up?

"Our own analysis found that the accident was caused by incorrectly performed maintenance tasks required by Disneyland policy and procedures that resulted in a mechanical failure," said Leslie Goodman, senior vice president of strategic communications for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.

Foldable popcult dollies
Printable templates for folding-and-glueing together Kubrick-like characters from Mario Brothers and other pieces of the popcult pantheon. Link (via KoKoRo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:47:52 AM permanent link to this entry

Book Five of King's Dark Tower is out
I've been addicted to Stephen King's Gunslinger books since I was about 17. They're long, tense, gripping tales, filled with enough po-mo weirdness to make them interesting and keep me guessing. The first book was begun when King was a teenager; the last book will be the last fiction King ever writes, according to him. Book five -- the third-to-last in the series -- is Wolves of the Calla, a 600+ page brick of a novel that I've just finished reading. It's a very satisfying installment in the saga, and ends, as they all do, on a cliff-hanger that is as exciting as it is exasperating. I can't wait for the next two. There aren't a lot of modern genre authors playing with the memes from the Western pulps these days; King's reinterpretation of them makes me want to dig up some old Zane Grey. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:27:56 AM permanent link to this entry

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Mightylady.net
Warren says:

"When clambering into an anime-girl body suit just isn't enough for you: there's MightyLady.Net, for those who derive special enjoyment from giant robot women, either in bondage, wrestling, doing gymnastics or on a slab being repaired. "

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:59:25 PM permanent link to this entry

Coming soon: America's first phonecam art show, "SENT"
I'm co-curating an exhibition of camera phone photography at sixspace art gallery in February, 2004. The project is called "SENT," and through it, we're inviting professional photographers, filmmakers, media personalities, and regular folks to explore the camera phone's potential as a creative tool:

Their use is largely utilitarian: snap a photo of your baby, your sunset, your face; then, share it with friends or family. They're small and cheap. We use them to capture the mundane, the obvious, and the personal. Soon, we'll use them to capture and manipulate data: phonecams are becoming handheld barcode readers, and tools for a variety of new mobile commerce applications.

The images they produce are undeniably crude, but like Polaroids or snapshots from vintage or "toy" cameras, that lack of finesse lends a distinctive, awkward charm. And the fact that they fuse together the abilities to capture, view, and distribute what we see (through e-mail or online photo weblogs) makes them revolutionary. Phonecams are changing the way we see the world, and our place within it. They're an extension of urban eyes. They democratize, hack, and deconstruct photography. When everyone is both photographer and publisher, how will art change? How will human conversation change? What will be the difference between professional and amateur? Through SENT, we'll find out.

Check out the growing list of invited participants here -- and contact us if you're a technology company who'd like to get involved. Soon, we'll announce the launch of the completed project site, where anyone with a phonecam can contribute their snapshots to the exhibition. Link.

update: Now, NPR's in the mix. They've issued a "Phonecam Challenge," inviting listeners to contribute mobile phone snaps -- some of which will be included in SENT. Link to more info on NPR Phonecam Challenge. Listen: Real, or Windows
posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:23:56 AM permanent link to this entry

Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": phonecam revolution
On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Alex Chadwick about how phonecams are changing the way we communicate with each other, and the way we see the world around us. The segment includes a live in-studio demo (which produced the phonecam snapshot at left), and a chat with anthropologist Mimi Ito (yes, Joi Ito's sister!) who's been researching phonecams and culture in Japan and the US for several years. On Monday, she launched a "bento blog" -- a phonecam photo gallery where she archives snapshots pictures of the lunches she makes for her children every morning. How cool is that? Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show: Real, or Windows

posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:11:25 AM permanent link to this entry

NPR's turkey Soda taste test
Click thumbnail for full-size phonecam snap. "Day to Day" host Alex Chadwick did taste test of that Jones Turkey and Gravy soda yesterday. I was in the studio just before the moment of horror, and snapped this phonecam shot of NPR producer Kathryn Fox preparing for Mr. Chadwick's total grossout. Listen to the segment here, after 12PM PST. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:04:35 AM permanent link to this entry

Exotica album produced through open collaboration, licensed CC
Michael sez, "Two Zombies Later is a 'double CD' set... The artists featured on these 'discs' are all members of the Exotica mailing list and within the shortest period of time managed to get together and compile this compilation. The whole set is downloadable as MP3s and has been published under the Creative Commons license. They will only be available (at this URL) for 3 months, after that, they are taken 'off the market' and (hopefully) something else will be published." Link (Thanks, Michael)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:18:38 AM permanent link to this entry

Guy in Japan makes girl masks from paper, then asphyxiates himself.
Matt Fraction, trying desperately to kick the extreme japorn web hunt habit, found this -- and forwards, with apologies

"Kumiko" says: "can't stop myself to go to the deadline. The second series I took off my wig and I wrapped my head tightly. At my neck, there are no hole for new air. There are no tricks in these pix. Please stop your breath while you're browsin these. Please, please NOT do the same. You must be killed. "

By the time you read this, the Geocities Japan site will be BoingBoinged to death, but: Link (didn't notice nudity or explicit sexual content, but didn't stay too long, either)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:17:57 AM permanent link to this entry

Diebold rolls on back, pisses self, begs for mercy
Diebold has withdrawn its lawsuit threats against the sites that republished the leaked memos demonstrating its gross malfeasance in its voting machine business. Having had these memos exposed by whistle-blowers, Diebold sought to use copyright law to censor websites that published them. Then EFF took up the cause of one of the site-operators, the Online Policy Group, and now Diebold is slinking away with its tail between its legs, off to plot the downfall of democracy in some rancid warren of its own devising. Don't let the courtroom door hit yer ass on the way out. Link (via Copyfight)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:14:19 AM permanent link to this entry

Diebold ATMs are vulnerable to worms
Diebold's ATMs, which run Windows XP, are the first ATMs to become infected with malware:

It is the first known case of a worm actually installing itself on individual ATM operating systems, says Peter Lind, a security expert at Spire Security in Malvern, Pennsylvania...

Diebold does not know how the worm got on to the closed financial network. But security experts suggest it could have been carried past security measure on an infected laptop computer. The laptop would have contracted Welchia while connected to the internet, and then transferred it when later connected to the financial network.

Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:42:10 AM permanent link to this entry

Hilbert's 16th problem solved by 22-year-old student
A Swedish math student has solved number 15 part of number 16 of David Hilbert's 23 math problems for the Twentieth Century, which has stood unsolved since 1900. Link (Thanks, Mikael!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:30:56 AM permanent link to this entry

35,000 zombies form lobby group in India
35,000 Indians have joined the Association of the Living Dead, a group of people whose relatives have cheated them out of their fortunes by bribing officials to have them declared legally dead. The living dead, being dead, can't afford the counterbribes necessary to get un-dead-ified.

The ``living dead,'' having been cheated out of their property, cannot afford to pay bribes or even legitimate fees to get their cases dealt with.

Lal Bihari, president of the Association of the Living Dead, estimated 35,000 people in Uttar Pradesh state have been wrongly certified as dead.

Creative Commons Moving Image deadline looms
The Creative Commons Moving Image contest (which gets you a G5 or equally shitkicking PC as grand prize for a two-minute film explaining Creative Commons) deadline of Dec 31 is fast approaching -- time to get started! Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:01:12 AM permanent link to this entry

Yesterday was the best day of my writing career (so far!)
Yesterday, I had the flat-out most amazing day of my writing career:

I finally got to see the paperback edition of my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is out just in time for Christmas. For various good reasons, Tor elected to publish the hardcover in January of last year, too late for Christmas shoppers. A lot of people complained (including me), but it's clear that they knew what they were doing -- the book didn't end up competing with the big, frontlist holiday titles and sold very well indeed. Still, I'm very grateful indeed that the paperback (which Amazon has for $10.36) is out in time for the holidays this year.

I also got to hold a copy of the second edition of A Place So Foreign and Eight More, my short story collection, which sold out its first print run in six weeks or so and is well on the way to selling out the second edition, I'm told. A bunch of you submitted errata for this printing, and made it a better book altogether. I'm told that the next printing will have the Neil Gaiman quote added to the cover, which is all to the good indeed.

As if that weren't enough, I also got a stack of gorgeous, color-cover advance review copies of Eastern Standard Tribe, my second novel which will be a March, 2004 hardcover on sale in late January (pre-order it for a 30 percent discount). The William Gibson quote on the cover ("Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar -- a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)") looks unspeakably swell...

But the good news kept coming. I also got word that my agent, Don Maass, has sold my next two novels, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and /usr/bin/god, to Tor for 2005 and 2006 publication.

The icing on the cake is that I signed off on the inclusion of Flowers from Alice, a short story that Charlie Stross and I co-wrote for Mike Resnick's forthcoming New Faces in Science Fiction anthology, in a Year's Best Science Fiction anthology.
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:46:11 AM permanent link to this entry

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Bruce Sterling and "Tech Nouveau" design examples
On Bruce Sterling's Viridian email list this week, a round-up of 21st-century "Tech Nouveau": buildings and products that incorporate organic forms in a manner similar to Art Nouveau movement of the early 20th century. Some cool outtakes:

* "There is a new, witty nouveau afoot, from the Vallo watering can by Monika Mulder at Ikea, which looks like a stork," Link (halfway down the page)
* "to the coffee and tea set by Greg Lynn for Alessi, which opens like a clove of garlic." Link
* "Tord Boontje's chandeliers for Swarovski look like clouds of slender branches surrounding a light." Link
* "In the United States, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum looks like a giant bird about to take off." Link
* "William Sawaya, a designer based in Milan, created a blossom-like plastic Calla chair for Heller, which was inspired by a lily." Link
* "A new digital camera for Creative Labs by the California company Whipsaw Design takes its inspiration from the many-chambered spiral shell called the nautilus." Link

Lovemarks.com: I love/respect this brand!
Snarked from Gawker:

Charles "Chucky" Saatchi, swinging advertising mogul, thinks it's time for you to revel in the consuming pleasure that is Lovemarks: the future beyond brands. At the oddly confusing Lovemarks.com, "real people" write in about how favorite brands moved from objects to something more like family members. Adidas: "Reminds me of my childhood." BMW: "Mystery, aura and history oozes out." Abercrombie & Fitch: "I started wearing their clothes and it made me cool and hip differentiating me with the rest of the Gap wearing populace." (Snicker. Mmm, Snickers! I could go for one of those...)

Link (Spotted first by Invisible Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:14:41 PM permanent link to this entry

Neckaces made from keyboard keys
Funky jewelry made from keyboard keys. I want one now, along with one of the "I [heart] geeky boys" pins! Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 2:39:24 PM permanent link to this entry

Kigurimi vs. Cosplay
Welcome to episode four in BoingBoing's crash course on the global cybercartoon fetish pantheon. So, apparently, there's a difference between Kigurimi and cosplay: masks. Fleshbot and BoingBoing reader Sarmoung says:

There's a certain blurring between the two types of dressing up in Japan, but there are certain distinctions. Cosplay is almost always mask free and draws on various video game, manga and anime characters. This is more fantastic in look generally. The majority of cosplayers in Japan aren't too happy about its infiltration into the hardcore adult market, but there's no denying its clear debt/links to the fetish scene. There's a book out in English called "Cosplay Girls" and you can find a fair amount of adult (and non-adult) cosplay related material via J-List. Nao Oikawa has done a fair amount of this adult cosplay work.

The use of masks makes it kigurumi. These are in origin the same as people in Goofy outfits of whatever at Disneyland. You seem them frequently enough at amusement parks in Japan or doing product promotions in the street. These are also generally drawn from the manga/anime/game world. Now some people do this for a living and some do it as a hobby. Obviously it's a step beyond as these people tend to wear full skin-toned body stockings, unitards and whatever in addition to the masks. Also, you suspect that many of the hobbyists are men although this isn't always the case. It's just impossible to tell, although the hands do give it away much of the time.

What you then discover is that kigurumi is further subdivided between people who wear manga styled masks and costumes (pointy chins, huge eyes, etc) and those who go for a ultra-realist look, where the costumes become much more everyday. This then sort of leads on to Japanese ultrarealist love dolls.

Inkha, the Roboceptionist
BoingBoing reader Roland writes:

In "Robo-receptionist clocks on," Nature tells us the story of Inkha, a robot which greets guests of King's College London (KCL) and adds artificial intelligence to the front desk. "Inkha -- short for 'interactive neurotic King's head assembly' -- will dole out directions and events information. Like receptionists across the globe, she will also comment on the weather and fashion faux pas." Inkha was funded with a £8,400 grant and has become a celebrity in the U.K. It even has its own website, http://www.sallywhoosh.btinternet.co.uk/. More details are available in this overview, which also includes pictures of Inkha.

British Library catalogue soon searchable through Amazon
Amazon has purchased a license to create a searchable index of the entire British Library catalogue, including 1.7 million titles that predate ISBNs.

The deal gives Amazon the right to use the British Library's bibliographic catalogue, which contains 2.55 million books. Crucially it includes 1.7 million produced before the introduction in 1970 of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN), a 10-character code that uniquely identifies any modern book.

Erotic cosplay doll-mask photos
The snapshots of photorealistic latex doll faces on this website -- some deconstructed, others complete and ready to wear -- are as unnerving as they are flat-out beautiful. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:06:20 AM permanent link to this entry

Monday, November 24, 2003

Japorn anime cosplay and living-doll erotica, part two: Kigurumi
BoingBoing reader Justin Brown -- who wins an honorary Link-Fu master award -- says:

"After you posted that creepy Sabrina link on BoingBoing, [I discovered that this is] a form of cosplay called Kigurumi. This site has some good definitions, and this site also has interviews with people who do kigurumi. I am throughly creeped out now, and I blame you. Especially after seeing this page. But wait, it gets weirder: here, and here. Don't miss this -- middle aged man turns into Real Doll. But wait, thats a copy of this. I'm going to attempt to sleep now, I expect I'll have some really strange dreams."

The Kigurimi enthusiast behind the mask in the snapshot at left (from one of the sites Justin points to), says:

"This is my all time favorite female mask. It is made by Natori of the Photogenic mask site. The cost is around $900.00 and it is in my opinion the most realistic female mask I have seen. Plus I love to be a super cute Japanese girl. The only drawback to this mask is the limited vision and breathing."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:31:00 PM permanent link to this entry

News from the Iranian blogosphere
Toronto-based blogger Hossein Derakhshan points us to two new developments. First: the launch of iranFilter, a new collaborative website focused on Iran (Link). And, news that Iranian vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi has started a weblog -- he's the first major Iranian politician to do so. (Link to Persian blog, link to the vice-president's English site.).
posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:38:04 PM permanent link to this entry

Weird, weird cosplay Japorn. Sort of. I can't explain.
I have no idea what this is, but it's totally freaking me out. Like a Philip K. Dick stripshow. All I can tell you is that this link takes you to a Windows Media video clip in which a (male) human dressed in (female) animated child character drag performs a sort of webcam erotic tease. Shemale hentai cosplay? Something like that. Please, someone, explain. Keep watching, eventually Sabrina strips. No actual nudity, just oddity. Link (Thanks, Warren, thanks Matt)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:31:16 PM permanent link to this entry

Olympics serves ROBOlympics with cease-and-desist
David Calkins, president of the Robotics Society of America, tells Boingboing that the ROBOlympics -- a biannual robot game and expo -- has been C&D'd by the recently-scandal-ridden US Olympic Committee.

The bot-builders' expo has apparently been asked to stop using, well, the name ROBOlympics. "Of course, the hinge is the term 'athletic event,' " says David. "Are robot events athletic? Doesn't really matter if I can't afford the lawyers."

The ROBOlympics event is slated to take place at Fort Mason Center Herbst Pavilion, San Francisco, California, in March of 2004, and will include contestants from around the world to help promote robotics, engineering, and education.
posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:41:38 PM permanent link to this entry

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools -- the book
Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired and the former editor of Whole Earth Magazine, has self-published my favorite book for 2003: a 140-page color book with reviews of his favorite "gadgets, how-to books, amazing documentaries, great pieces of software, uncommon mail order catalogs, websites, pieces of machinery, and things you can grab with your hand." If you've seen the old Whole Earth Catalogs, then you already have a good idea of what Cool Tools is like. No matter how much you already know, you'll find dozens of things in here to blow your mind. Hurry, because Kevin only printed 250 copies. They cost $20 at Amazon.com Link
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 3:34:08 PM permanent link to this entry

Call for Creepy Santas
My friend Kirsten Anderson (who owns the far out Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle) is publishing a photography book of bad, drunk, deranged, drug-addled, criminal, and slovenly Santas. If you want to contribute a photo read on:

Here Comes Santa Claus! - Ignition Books Fall 2004

While sorting through old photographs at my mother's house one Christmas, I came across a photograph that was to haunt me for years. It was a photo taken at a mall of my brother Michael sitting on the lap of Santa Claus. Innocent enough- loads of people have pictures of themselves or thier children sitting on Santa's lap...it's a tradition to see Santa every year, tell him what you'd like for Christmas,and get a candy cane. What struck a chord with me about this picture was the Santa himself. Slouched into the chair, one arm clumsily draped around my brother, much in the same way barflys casually hug thier fellow brethren before falling to the floor in a stupor. I looked closer...thick black body hair sprouted from every opening of the ill fitting Santa suit, the too-short trouses- revealing fish white, strangely pocked legs. This Santa boasted one enormous black eyebrow, an 5'oclock shadow (needless the say the beard was falling off) and the dull gleam of narcotics in the one eye that wasn't drooping and looking far past the camera. This was GREAT! I then turned my attention to my brother who I now realised was not merely smiling on command for the camera but rather was grimacing, rigid in fear on his hobo Santa's lap, fists clenched, eyes silently pleading. Oh how I laughed.

After I finished enjoying my brother's pain, I started thinking about the whole Santa Claus phenomenon...every mall has a Santa come Christmas-time, and let's face it- most of those Santas ain't "Miracle on 42'd Street" quality. I figured there were probably tons of these photos floating around, kids horrified by thier low rent Santa and being scolded if they didn't "Smile, dammit" for the capture of a warm holiday memory. I began to ask around if anyone else had horrible Santa pics, and indeed, a small flood came in...drunk Santas, passed out Santas, creepy Santas. I decided to make a book and share the wealth.

Of course, the more the merrier so I am ever on the lookout for Santa pics for inclusion in the book. I'm hoping to get as many as I can so I can pick the choicest, the most god awful,and the funniest Santas with terrified children for the project. People can mail or email me photos that they'd like to submit. In return, people's whose pictures I include in the book will get thier name in the book (unless the shame requires anonymity) and a free copy of the book. These pictures would only be used for this book and any promotional press associated with it. I will return all hard copies (photos, discs, ect). Contracts will be required for publication.

Interested person can mail photos or 300dpi scans of thier drunken, flea ridden, pervy, waxy complexioned Santas to me at:

Kirsten Anderson
Ignition Publishing
4015 Airport Way S
Seattle WA 98121
(206)374-8977

or email questions or 300 dpi jpegs to me at : mailto:%20kirsten@ignitionpublishing.com

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:12:24 AM permanent link to this entry

3-year-old xylophonist prodigy video
Jed sez, "Video clip of Mo Kin, a 3-year-old North Korean girl, playing a complicated xylophone tune. (Until the voiceover narration made a big deal about how perfect her facial expression was, I thought she looked like she was having a great time; later, I wasn't so sure.)" Link (Thanks, Jed!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:40:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Autistic savants
Steve Silberman, who wrote a brilliant piece on geeks and autism in Wired a couple years back, has a great long feature in the current issue about autistic "savants" -- people who have an instinctive, brilliant grasp of some abstruse task, such as music or math. There's some very good stuff about this in Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, particularily when he discusses very "low-functioning" people who have an intuitive understanding of music and numbers that is almost spiritual in nature.

When Matt was 6, he confided to his mother, "My mind is made of math problems." Diane started buying him math workbooks for kids twice his age. He zipped through them so quickly, she learned to hide a few in a drawer so he'd have something to work on the following day.

Then one night, Diane and Larry heard a melody coming from downstairs. It was their son, playing "London Bridge" on a toy keyboard. Diane brought Matt into the family room and introduced him to the middle C on the piano. Within a day, he was devouring music books as hungrily as he had math books.

Matt took classical lessons for a year, then Diane enrolled him in the jazz program at the New England Conservatory of Music. Upon meeting his first jazz instructor there, a bearish Israeli whose last name is Katsenelenbogen, Matt cried out, "Six syllables!"

How to change phone-carriers
As of today, you can take you phone number with you when you change mobile carriers. There's a good set of tips for potential switchers:

* Go to company/ carrier stores for switching. Trust me when I say that the guys at RadioShack, Best Buy and Staples are morons who don’t know anything about switching right now.

* Adventis folks advise that if you are a user of data services, check with your new service provider regarding the availability of services that you have become accustomed to. Functionality and availability of data services, as well as the customer experience itself (e.g., transfer rates) varies considerably from carrier to carrier.

* Back-up your cell-phone contact list data to your computer by using a data sync cable or bluetooth connections otherwise you will spend an entire weekend punching in phone numbers.

Anti-advertising to out iPod's dirty secret
iPod's Dirty Secret is a three-minute movie made by an iPod owner to protest the fact that Apple won't replace his 18-month-old iPod's dead battery. He's engaged in a one-man guerrilla anti-advertising campaign to stencil a warning over Apple's street posters promoting iPod.

As commenters on Dan Gillmor's blog have pointed out, Apple can replace your iPod battery for $99, and there are third-party service options as well. 6.9MB Quicktime Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:29:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Sunday, November 23, 2003

Saturday, November 22, 2003

Rude cross-stitching
Subversive Cross-stitch: rude and snarky cross-stitch patterns to amaze and delight. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:19:57 PM permanent link to this entry

Vivendi burning MP3.com library to the ground
Vivendi has announced that it's flushing all the music it hosts at MP3.com down the toilet:

...they're not selling the archive, containing more than a million songs by 250,000 artists. As of December 3rd, they're destroying it.

Tech Bloom
Alex Steffen has written an op-ed describing the new give-it-away-for-free tech ethos:

The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.

Not just making it, but giving it away. Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.

Which may be why the media haven't quite gotten the magnitude of what's happening here: It's not about investments. If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.

Friday, November 21, 2003

Psychic TV 3.0 to play in NYC!
The latest incarnation of seminal industrial/electronica band Psychic TV will play on Devember 5 in New York City. PTV3 features Boing Boing co-conspirator Douglas Rushkoff on keyboard. Don't miss this rare appearance by the pandrogynous Genesis Breyer P-Orridge sporting his newly-installed breast implants. Link
posted by David Pescovitz at 3:29:34 PM permanent link to this entry

Robot in the Sky! (almost)
Seiko Epson Corp. showed off their flying micro-robot at this week's International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. EE Times reports that ultrasonic wristwatch motors keep the 8.9 grab machine airborne. It's also outfitted with Bluetooth and several microsensors including a gyro and camera. Right now though, battery weight keeps it tethered to its power supply. (The photo is from Yahoo! News.) Link (Thanks, Gabe!)
posted by David Pescovitz at 3:20:34 PM permanent link to this entry

The Zombie Within
Good L.A. Weekly profile of Caltech professor of computation and neural systems, Christoff Koch.

As we sit in Koch’s office, he offers to reveal to me a small portion of my own zombie self. For a moment I am seized by visions of a nasty chemical cocktail, my mind turned to mush, my body rendered into a helpless puppet, but instead of reaching for a syringe, Koch turns on his computer. He brings up an image of an airplane on a runway and tells me that when he presses a key some major feature will disappear. I am to tell him what it is. Koch jabs at the keyboard and the image flashes momentarily, but as far as I can tell everything remains the same. He does it again, several times, but still I see nothing different. Finally Koch tells me it is the aircraft’s fuselage that disappears. Once it’s pointed out, the omission becomes glaringly evident.

Ferberizing my baby
I wrote a journal entry at TheFeature about training my baby daughter to fall asleep on her own, using the "Ferber" method. It really works!

We decided to 'ferberize' [Jane]. Dr. Richard Ferber is a child sleep specialist who has a come up with a method to train babies to go to sleep on their own, and help them sleep through the night. Basically, it works like this: at bedtime, you kiss your baby and set her in the crib and walk out. She'll holler bloody murder, but you have to stay out of the room for five minutes. Then you can come back in and pat the baby on the back and reassure her that you haven't packed up and moved to Estonia without her. Then you leave the room again and wait 10 minutes, then 15, then 20. She'll eventually fall asleep, according to the good doctor.

Here Come the Media Phones
Here's a piece I wrote for TheFeature called "Here Come the Media Phones."

It's too early to make the claim that most people don't want handhelds that play live audio and video and offer interactive multimedia services and entertainment. The lack of interest might be a classic example of the chicken-or-egg syndrome. Are customers staying away from premium services because they don't like the services being offered? Or have carriers and manufacturers been afraid to invest the money it takes to create compelling media phones and media services when the customers don't seem to want them?

Web Zen: Music Video Zen
i've seen things
floral dance
sorry
elephant yeah!
space monkey
del gazeebo
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:19:57 AM permanent link to this entry

Kevin Werbach on why good isn't good enough for mobile devices
In The Feature this week, Kevin Werbach explores how small improvements in small devices can mean big results:

Last month, I bought a Treo 600, the new PalmOS smartphone. I'm still marveling over one aspect: its size. When I took the Treo out of the box, it looked half as big as its predecessor, the Treo 300. The first comment of most people who see it is, "Wow, that's tiny for a smartphone!" When I actually put the current and prior Treo models side-by-side, however, I was in for a shock. The Treo 600 is slightly narrower, but it's also taller, thicker, and heavier. In other words, essentially the same size. The many small industrial design changes make a world of subjective difference.

I use this example not because I'm enthralled with my new toy (though I admit I am), but because of what it suggests for the mobile world. Subtle improvements can have huge consequences. The same is true when it comes to functionality. A torrent of incremental advances are now producing converged devices that are "good enough" at each of their primary functions. This will have significant consequences for both device manufacturers and operators.

A Twist on Tele-robotics: Today at noon PST!

Boing Boing pal Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley invites us back to play another round of Tele-Twister, the telepresence-based version of the classic party game. The mad professor says:

"Left foot red? Right hand green? In the newly redesigned Java-based variation of the classic '60s party game, users join forces with others online to direct the movements of live humans on the playing board. The game tests leadership ability as users try to influence group dynamics and out-strategize the opposing team. Players are ranked continuously using a new scoring metric (link to PDF paper) based on clustering and user response times. Live games run from 12-1pm Pacific Time on Fridays." Link

Freenet's Ian Clarke on latest threat to P2P -- from within.
Ian Clarke, who recently relocated from LA to Edinburgh, Scotland, says, "I just threw together an article on what may be the latest threat to P2P, and this one comes from within the industry." Snip:

Altnet, the company most responsible for the proliferation of spyware, recently acquired a patent which allows easy identification of files on a P2P network. In the words of Derek Broes, Altnet's executive vice president of worldwide operations, Altnet will "...focus on protecting and commercializing our patented technology and realizing the potential it offers content owners by commercializing peer-to-peer networks". Just another day in the world of little-league software companies you think. Not so.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this picture. The so-called "Truenames" patent, filed in 1997, is little-more than a marketspeak-friendly name slapped on a decades old and widely known technique in computer science called "hashing". A hashing algorithm takes a file, and produces a "signature" for that file, a short set of letters and numbers that, for any two identical files, will always be the same. This technique has often been used to detect identical files, or to verify the integrity of software downloaded over the Internet. Clearly, it requires very little imagination to suppose that hashing might also prove useful when verifying the integrity of files on a P2P network.

This, of course, puts Mr Broes' quote in a somewhat sinister new light. In a classic example of P.R "doublespeak", what he refers to as protection, most would see as an anti-competitive offensive, and what he refers to as commercialization, most would refer to as extortion. Yes, the implication of recent public statements from Altnet is that they plan to use their government granted monopoly on an obvious idea to force other P2P companies, through threat of litigation, into cooperating with whatever scheme they are cooking up.

Overuse of copyright is its downfall
Interesting Legal Times article argues that the assertion of copyright where none exists and other abuses of copyright are the real cause behind the public's sharing-is-OK attitude as evidenced by the file-sharing networks.

Owning a copy is not the same as owning a copyright. Yet publishers routinely require their own authors who want to use reproductions of old diaries, maps, photographs, or other images long out of copyright to obtain a license from a library, museum, or other owner of a physical copy. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, many authors find this requirement too much trouble and just omit the image.

...many academic authors have faced the uphill battle of persuading their own publisher to let them include excerpts from the copyrighted works of others. Fair use is meant to allow and encourage such conversations among authors. However, publishers routinely edit out fairly used materials and require their authors to indemnify them against any claims for infringement.

Conference calls: excuse for nudity and websurfing
An international survey reveals that nudity and inattention are astonishingly common among particpants in conference callls:

So what are they doing instead? Twenty-nine percent of British workers say they doodle, while 22 percent of Germans surf the web. Twenty percent of Americans say they have side conversations with someone else during conference calls.

It gets weirder: 22 percent of Hong Kong workers admit they weren't fully dressed during their last teleconference, while 14 percent of them were doing their makeup or hair.

Order-5 Magic Cube discovered
A Magic Cube is a three dimensional Magic Square: a 3D grid in which the numbers in all the rows, columns and diagonals total up to the same number. The very first order-5 Magic Cube (previously suspected to be impossible) has been discovered. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:00:54 AM permanent link to this entry

Images from the Victorian Internet
Amazing B3TA photoshop challenge: graphics from the "Victorian Internet." Lovely, witty steampunkery to be found here.

Funnily enough, I just (finally!) read Tom Standage's wonderful book, The Victorian Internet on an airplane yesterday. Standage's account of the rise of the telegraph worldwide vividly brings to life the personalities and the mania that brought the first global communications system into being, and draws fascinating parallels to the Internet boom, and the promises raised, fulfilled and betrayed therein. Link (via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:56:48 AM permanent link to this entry

U of C grad students' online health-care preservation campaign
Grad students at the University of Chicago are attempting to shame the administration into reversing its plans to substantially undermine health insurance there. They're soliciting health-care horror stories from U of C grad-students to help them make their case. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:51:14 AM permanent link to this entry

E Coli DNA used to assemble nanoscale transistors
Israeli scientists have successfully coaxed DNA into acting as an assembler for nanoscale transistors.

Braun's team began their manufacturing process by coating a central part of a long DNA molecule with proteins from an E. coli bacterium. Next, graphite nanotubes coated with antibodies were added, which bound onto the protein.

After this, a solution of silver ions was added. The ions chemically attach to the phosphate backbone of the DNA, but only where no protein has attached. Aldehyde then reduces the ions to silver metal, forming the foundation of a conducting wire.

Kenyan minibus strike ends
Kenya's minibus drivers -- who provide the primary form of transportation for commuters -- have ended their two-day strike over a government mandate requiring them to put seatbelts in their vehicles.

There's something strange happening in Kenya. At the Broadcast Treaty meeting at WIPO this month, the Kenyan delegate revealed that his country has recently outlawed taking photos of the pictures on your television set; when we cornered him on this, he said that he couldn't answer out questions without first consulting with the representative of the US National Association of Broadcasters, who appears to be in charge of shaping Kenyan IP policy. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:46:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Disney films kicking a$$, despite "piracy"
Disney's annual financials reveal that the company is making giant truckloads of money off of its movies, despite a couple of recent flops (and losing money on its themeparks). Funnily enough, this comes at a time when Disney is, along with Fox and other MPAA members, winning the Broadcast Flag fight by claiming that infringing Internet distribution of movies is bad for business, so much so that they need to be put in charge of all PC technology in order to ensure that "anti-piracy" tools are in place throughout every box. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:43:12 AM permanent link to this entry

Kyrgyzstani grave-robbers supplying museums with corpse-chunks
A Kyrgyzstani MP alleges that the Kyrgyz mafia has been exporting tons of human corpses and corpse-chunks to museum curators and artists.

But Tashtanbekov, who spearheaded the hearing, said on Wednesday that he intended to keep up his campaign to uncover what he claims is a "mafia operation" that he says has exported 35 tons of bodies and body parts in the last six years.

Skinny people win eating contests
PopSci uses a biology lesson to explain why skinny guys always win eating contests.

Kobayashi's regimen includes shrinking his gut by jogging for hours, then distending it by chugging gallons of water. He regularly feasts on giant meals of low-fat, high-fiber foods like cabbage, which stay in the stomach longer before breaking down. (By the way, the world record for cabbage consumption is 6 pounds, 9 ounces, in 9 minutes, held by American Thomas Hardy.) And he keeps trim: A skinny man's stomach has little fat to push against it and fight the food for space.

Way being paved for petaflop computing
Cray and Sun are working on radical new operating systems and programming environments for the coming petaflop supercomputers.

Zima said the new language will help software developers exploit both parallel programming techniques and the locality of data in a large clustered system. The language will hide details of the underlying CPU but expose specifics about the communications technology used in the high-end cluster. It will also support today's message-passing interface (MPI) and global-address-space programming models, he added.

Collaborative object-sexing
This object-sexer is a hot-or-not site that asks you to express your feelings about the probable gender of inanimate objects (these tins of soup are considered "male" by 61.4% of respondents).

To quote Ken Campbell's astonishing Wol Wontok (an annotated translation of pieces of Macbeth into South Seas Island pidgin, and my kingdom for a decent link for this), "You know that [linguistic] organization where things are masculine, feminine or neuter, and ridiculously so in German, so you might say, 'Where is the turnip?' and the reply might be, 'She is in the kitchen.' And then you say, 'Where is the young English maiden?' and the reply would be, 'It has gone to the opera.' Nutty!" Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:34:13 AM permanent link to this entry

Funeral interrupted by corpse's cellphone
A Belgian funeral service was interrupted when the corpse's cellphone started ringing from inside the coffin.

The night before the funeral, the family gathered at the undertakers for a final private farewell, when they heard the sound of his cellphone ringing from within the sealed coffin. Several distressed members of the family had to leave the funeral home whilst staff rushed to remove the cell phone.

Lowcarbing preciptates American bread crisis
American breadmakers have called a summit to discuss strategies for coping with the plummeting sales of carbo-rich bread in an Atkins-ascendant America.

Consumption of bread plummeted in America in the past year with an estimated 40 per cent of Americans eating less than in 2002. The US bread industry is to hold a crisis "bread summit" tomorrow to discuss measures to curb falling sales. In Britain, the Federation of Bakers launched a promotional campaign last month to counter the Atkins effect. British Bread month was advertised with the slogan "Use your loaf, have another slice."

Thursday, November 20, 2003

I Heart Nerds Pin
I must have this right now. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 4:24:24 PM permanent link to this entry

Asimo in Paris
BoingBoing pal Roland says:

One of the current exhibits at the cultural representation of Japan in France -- Maison de la Culture du Japon -- is about men and robots -- Hommes et robots (pages in French). And Asimo, the fantastic robot from Honda, is in Paris until November 22. I must admit Asimo's presence on stage is overwhelming. In particular, there was a crucial moment I was unable to catch, when Asimo received an Eiffel Tower from the -- human -- presenter's hands, and put it on a table several meters away. You'll find several somewhat wicked pictures of the 1.2 meter high and 52 kg robot in this photo gallery.

Streaming obsession du jour: LynnFox's vid for FC Kahuna's "Hayling"
I can't stop playing this on my laptop: the video LynnFox created for FC Kahuna's song "Hayling." LynnFox is a UK-based collective of crazy boys who do crazy things with computers. I met them a few weeks ago in Spain, at this event. Here's what I learned in Barcelona: they can drink any non-android Earth inhabitant under the table, they are fun to troll dive bars with, and they build amazing, brilliant, superfunky digital dreamscapes like the one in this video -- which involves a robotic sea anemone. Watch it here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:15:17 AM permanent link to this entry

It's a steaming pile of synthetic poo! No, it's art! No, it's both!
Wim Delvoye, the artist Warren Ellis describes as "the Walt Disney of poop," is about to launch a superpowered version 2.0 of "Cloaca," a crap-themed art installation that grossed and wowed patrons of the New Museum in 2002. Snipped from Hint magazine:

[Delvoye's] Frankensteinian contraption -- when "fed" food twice a day -- mechanically and chemically recreated the human digestive process all the way to the bitter end. Now, the Belgian artist has pumped up the dump with Cloaca Turbo, a supercharged poop-making machine -- currently on view at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in the northern Italian city of Prato -- that produces a constant stream of excrement. "It's an industrial version of what you've seen in New York," Delvoye says, explaining that its New Museum predecessor only performed once daily. "It has a 250 liter capacity, which is a lot, and that ends up in 40 kilograms [about 90 pounds of waste] spread throughout museum hours." It's the latest in a body of work that includes oddities like gas canisters decked in Delft porcelain and stained glass windows paned with erotic x-rays, all aiming to bring together the high and low or, in this case, the technological and biological.

Link to museum home page, Link to story with background on Cloaca 1.0. Also check Delvoye's luscious, large-format X-rated X-rays-- cited here on Fleshbot today. Worksafe if you're a radiologist.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:23:52 AM permanent link to this entry

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Goatse casemod
If you've hung around the Internet long enough, chances are you've encountered the Goatse guy (he's not hard to find -- google it if you're curious and want to be lastingly revulsed, but don't say I didn't warn you). Slashdot has added whole volumes of code just to keep users from tricking each other into opening this photo.

That said, this casemod -- an obvious homage to Goatse -- made me laugh aloud. Link (Thanks, Soninlawofsam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:54:27 PM permanent link to this entry

Crafting hipsters unite
At Craftster (a community for crafting hipsters), the motto is, "No tea cozies without irony." Get in touch with your kitsch-fetish and your urbanity, all at once. Link (Thanks, Leah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:59 AM permanent link to this entry

Japanese rubber monsters of the 1970s
Amazing gallery of famous Japanese monsters of the 1970s. I have just fallen down the clip-art hole. Link (via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:46 AM permanent link to this entry

Emerging t-shirts
Emergants sells t-shirts with slogans relating to "emerging tech:" P2P, Open Source and nanotechnology. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:25:45 AM permanent link to this entry

Googlehouse
BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc says, "This incredible Net Art page from french artists Rika Dermineur and Stephane Degoutin uses Google Images search -- with the following words "X + house" -- to constructs a wall with all these pics and form a live 3D collage. The artists tell that it's a kind of mirror that shows how intimacy is revealed on the Internet, and what role Google plays in that process." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:42:34 AM permanent link to this entry

G4 Cube fishtank
Got a dead, orphaned Apple G4 Cube lying around? According to the ancient traditions of the Mac-faithful, this is a signal that you are to get out your caulking gun and turn it into a fishtank. Link (via MacSlash)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:26:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Spam Sandals: $12/pair
Spam Sandals: tagging meets irony meets luncheonmeat meets interweb. Link (Thanks, Alice!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:31:11 AM permanent link to this entry

Gamers' argot
Master game-designer Greg Costikyan's article, "Talk Like a Gamer," is an etymological excursion into gamer's argot. It reminds me of my favorite learned book on jargon, The Big Con, a book about grifters' slang, which I reviewed here.

Some games have separate gameworlds devoted to roleplayers and to power gamers--those who play primarily to become more powerful in the game world and can't be bothered with such fripperies as pseudo-Elizabethan chat. Power gamers seek to power level, increase in ability in the game quickly--often with the help of a more powerful character who provides buffs to allow the character to gain experience rapidly. This practice is called twinking--gaining quickly in power or level in a semi-illegitimate fashion through assistance from a more powerful character. The term is obviously derived from Twinkie, but the association with a sugary snack is not obvious--I surmise that the usage may come from gay slang, in which a "twinkie" is a cute young man with an older lover.

Celebrity dead photshopping
Nice Fark photoshopping contest: turn celebrities into the living dead. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:38:57 AM permanent link to this entry

Bond, eyes closed
There's something queerly compelling about this three-minute video of stills of people in James Bond movies with their eyes closed, dissolving into other people in Bond films with their eyes closed. 17MB Quicktime Link (Thanks, Johannes!))
posted by Cory Doctorow at 5:27:53 AM permanent link to this entry

Pink Floyd: The Wall action figures
Just in time for the holiday season: Pink Floyd: The Wall action figures. Collectible action figures. Strictly limited edition. (Limited, I suspect, to the number of units they think they can sell.) Link (via Smartpatrol)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:57:58 AM permanent link to this entry

USB-powered travel-sized Xmas tree
Imagine that you're a business-traveller whose whole life is packed into a 22 kg, Euro-airline-compliant rolling suitcase. Imagine it's the holiday season. There's no way you're going to pack a Xmas tree into your little roll-along, even though it would brighten up the generic hotel-room something fierce, especially when augmented by a couple airline-sized miniature liquor bottles, a carton of convenience-store eggnog, and the warbling of the bolted-down television tuned to a Donny and Marie Xmas Special.

Fear not. The USB Christmas Tree Light glows in six neon colors, packs handily into even the smallest suitcase, and has a candy-cane-striped cable that you can plug straight into your laptop for hours of lonely, festive fun. So draw the blackout curtains, drown out the roar of the passing airplanes, and hoist a phlegm-nog while you contemplate your email by the light of this cheery bit of decor. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:53:46 AM permanent link to this entry

Turkey Soda is the new Shamrock Shake
The Jones Soda Company has posted a (hoax?) announcement of its latest seasonal beverage: Turkey and Gravy Soda. Even if it turns out not to be true, I very much appreciate the deadpan delivery of the copy on the sell-page, and the graphics for the new bottle are fantastic. I wouldn't drink this, but I'd buy a bottle, soak the label off, scan it, and use it for desktop wallpaper.

"We are really excited about the limited test launch of our new flavored Turkey & Gravy beverage. This seasonal flavor allows us to enter a new market segment, the meal replacement market. The new flavor will also appeal to new consumers, those who prefers a savory type flavor to the traditional soda flavors," says Peter van Stolk, President & C.E.O. "With consumers becoming more and more health conscious, Jones Soda's Turkey & Gravy flavored beverage is a zero calorie and zero carbohydrate beverage that can be served warm or cold with a full flavor that will meet and will exceed our customer's expectation."

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Scam literary agent run to ground
A grifter who has made it her practice to rip off naive writers with a phony literary agency has been snagged, after a bewlidering array of international scores:

In a burst of activity, Melanie Mills--long known to be a scam literary agent--has promoted a nonexistent writers' conference in South Carolina, which she then cancelled without sending anyone their promised refunds on memberships they'd bought; faked her own death, masquerading as her own assistant and possibly as her own daughter as well; shut down her operation in North Myrtle Beach SC, and decamped to Canada; while operating under the name "Elizabeth von Hullessem", fraudulently promoted and sold memberships in a nonexistent literary conference in Banff (trading on the reputation of the prestigious Banff-Calgary Wordfest), plus an equally nonexistent charity concert in Banff to benefit autism; and vanished from Banff with tens of thousands of dollars in convention fees.

Home fashions for total perverts
Spotted in Hint Magazine:

"In a kinky convergence of couture and coitus, the London-based artist-designer duo of Basso & Brooke -- self-proclaimed 'enthusiasts of luxury, pomposity and irony' -- produce the most perverted fashion and items for the home we've ever seen. These include hot pads and tea towels illustrated with penises, eye masks quilted with illustrations of genitalia and picnic blankets splattered with ejaculation images. Our fave is a men's velvet v-neck sweater ($400), featuring drawings of high-heel shoes where the points are replaced with spouting male members in what has to be the ultimate in self-pleasure. Sadly, the heels are too good to be true, but the pullover exists and is available for sale at the website, along with an orgy scene of other goodies."

Link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:15:26 PM permanent link to this entry

Xbox DRM adds insult to heartbreak
Falling in love with a gamer sounds like a good idea, but who gets custody of saved games when you split up? Microsoft won't let you transfer saved games from the Xbox.

Justin is a man of action. He promptly called customer support. "I have two Xboxes," he said breathlessly. "A memory card that's too small and an ethernet cable. Lets try to figure this out..."

"So you're telling me it's not possible for my ex-girlfriend to take with her her own saved games? I can't believe that! You make it sound like hacking my Xbox is a good idea!"

LA county says tech vendors can't use BDSM slang for equipment
An anonymous Boingboing pal shares an actual email from the Los Angeles County Purchasing and Contract Services Director, asking technology vendors to refrain from using the terms "master" or "slave" to refer to interrelating parts -- for example, a "master" hard drive controlling a "slave" client device. Perhaps Dom/Sub/Switch would be more apropos. Talk SCSI to me, baby: who's your (hard drive's) daddy? Snip:

The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County's expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.

One such recent example included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words ''Master/Slave'' appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label. We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment or components thereof that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature before such equipment is sold or otherwise provided to any County department.

Yahoo embraces porn ads again, sort of
Yahoo yanked X-rated products and banner ads from its American portal under pressure from conservative groups in 2001 -- but apparently, they're now back in the biz:

With the acquisition of Overture Services last month, Yahoo is now selling ads to a range of hard-core Web sites. Those ads appear on two search engines Yahoo acquired as part of the Overture deal -- AltaVista and AlltheWeb.com. Yahoo's latest embrace of the adult industry has attracted little attention until now. The Sunnyvale company has kept the adult ads off its popular U.S. portal, which has a mainstream image. Instead, the ads appear only on what are relatively small Web sites that few Internet users identify with Yahoo. The ads are also exported to Web sites outside the Yahoo family such as InfoSpace, which owns its own branded search engine, plus Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Tunisian blogger finally released from prison after hunger strikes, alleged torture
35-year-old Tunisian blogger Zouhair Yahyaoui, imprisoned since June 2002 for criticizing the Tunisian government on his weblog, was released on parole this morning. An overjoyed Sophie Elwarda -- his fiance, who campaigned tirelessly for his release -- tells BoingBoing:

"Zouhair returned to his family's home shortly after his release. This morning even, he was still unaware of this decision and thus has just stopped the hunger strike he started on November 2nd. He is very weak and suffers from his dental abscess due to poor medical care in prison, but seemed to be in a good mental state when he talked to us on the phone and thanks all those who have been supporting his case during all these months.

He does not forget the people he left behin him and said to one of his friends: "Two years are nothing compared to the long sentence of some of my fellow prisoners ". I can only express a very great happiness to know he is free, at his place finally, after this year and half of battle.

I thus dedicate my joy to all those who, by their thought, their messages of support (to which I sometimes forgot to answer), their presence, their combativity, their perseverance, allowed this day to come and that I write, finally, the press release I've always dreamed of ! I also dedicate it to all NGOs which supported Zouhair (by regard for those that I might forget, I do not make the list), to all the journalists who have been the echo of our voice, to his courageous family and to all those forming what Zouhair calls "his XXL family". And if I had only one hope to express, it would be this one: May this press release be REALLY the last !"

Sidewalk painter Kurt Wenner's 3D illusions
Gallery of amazing sidewalk paintings by Swedish chalk artist Kurt Wenner. UPDATE: Scott Underwood points out: Wenner is an American, educated at RISD and Art Center. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:33:25 AM permanent link to this entry

Gilbert Hernandez's 520-page comic anthology
Speaking of Los Bros H., here's a glowing review of Gilbert Hernandez's 520-page anthology, Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories compiled from past issues of Love and Rockets.Link
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:41:05 AM permanent link to this entry

Kevin Sites dispatch from Tikrit: "You're Either With Us..."
NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites has just posted a new update to his blog, live from Tikrit. Excerpt:

So in some ways, embedded in this unit, I begin to feel I've betrayed the people that depend on me to be skeptical; to question the dominant powers and institutions of my nation and the actions it undertakes in the name of its citizens. I am not a military or American cheerleader, not a mouthpiece signed on some institutional agenda whether I believe in it or not. I am here to ask the hard questions of the people who make the hardest decisions; ones that result in people dying or people being killed. I must remember as one journalist advised, "write in your notepad every day 'I am not one of them.'"

But in this room, where every piece of information is broken down quantitatively--number of patrols, number of raids, number of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), number of detainees, number of weapons -- and put back together in the form of a task completed or a mission to be accomplished, Operation Thunder Road, Operation Ivy Cyclone, the problems and solutions seem remarkably clear an seductively simple. (...)

Image above: Al Auja is the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. The community here was very pampered during his rule. But now U.S. forces feels it's a nest of former regime loyalists and anti coalition fighters. It's wrapped the entire town in triple layered razor wire. Male residents must register and carry ID cards. There is only one checkpoint that all four-thousand residents must enter and leave through. This man was already cleared to exit, but spun his wheels in anger on the way out. A U.S. soldier had a bead on him with his M-16 before he stopped his car. The second search was bit more invasive.

Jaime Hernandez interviewed
Here's an interview at suicidegirls.com with Jaime Hernandez, co-creator of the 25-year-old(!!) comic book Love and Rockets.

DRE: In doing my research I found hundreds and maybe thousands of articles written about the comic, you and your brother. Do you ever wonder why it doesn't translate into sales?

JH: Well when you're thinking about money it can get frustrating. Ok so yeah people have written about us for years, why isn't anyone following? That's one thing I have never been able to figure out, how to make them buy it. That's for someone else to figure out.

DRE: What's Gary Groth [co-owner of Fantagraphics books] say about that?

JH: They're just banging their heads against the wall. They tell us we were in Time magazine but no one's coming from it. It is nice that people appreciate it though. It's enough for me to continue. I've seen so many people stop doing their comics because they couldn't make a living.

Scary article about cell phone use and brain damage
The jury is still out on whether wireless phones can cause brain damage or cancer, but there are an increasing number of studies coming out that suggest it might not be smart to yack all day on your wireless phone.

Dr. Lief Salford, of Lund University in Sweden, who has called the evolution of wireless phones 'the largest biological experiment in the history of the world,' reported in June that cell phone radiation damaged neurons in the brains of young rats.

The study showed cells in the parts of rats' brains that control sensation, memory and movement died after being exposed to various cell phones at different levels of radiation for two hours.

'The situation of the growing brain might deserve special concern, since biological and maturational processes are particularly vulnerable,' Salford said.

He cautioned that it is possible that after decades of daily use a whole generation of users may suffer negative effects as early as middle age. The paper was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a U.S. National Institutes of Health journal.

Wacky, surreal ad artifact archive
In the misterpants ad archive: Kooky advertisements for spinach-flavored potato chips, Hello Kitty toilet paper, and more. Link (Via Geisha).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:07:06 AM permanent link to this entry

Wireless users chase George Bush across London
Cellphone-toting protesters pissed off about the "security bubble" surrounding George W. Bush during his ultra-high-security UK sojourn are using wireless tech to track his whereabouts -- and make their opinions known. This BBC News article has details, and this moblog captured a snapshot of one of the flyers soliciting participation from UK geeks. (thanks SH)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:55:12 AM permanent link to this entry

Railguns and other lethal electrical experiments
PowerLabs is where a serious electricity geek keeps track of his many railgun, disk-shooter, Tesla coil and related projects, documenting them with video, stills, blueprints and tutorials. Lethal fun! Link (Thanks, h1kari!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:30:28 AM permanent link to this entry

Monday, November 17, 2003

Dead Bug Funeral Kit
From David Barringer's site: The Dead Bug Funeral Kit comes with an Illustrated Buggy Book of Eulogies with Ribbon Bookmark, Casket, Grave Marker, White Clay Flower, Burial Scroll, and Pouch of Grass Seed.

"We are deeply saddened by your loss. We hope the Dead Bug Kit will honor your bug. We are working as briskly as we can to make these Kits, but there is a lot of grief in this world. And there are a lot of bugs. We appreciate your patience." Link (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 4:42:18 PM permanent link to this entry

Democratic candidates should pledge an open Internet
Dave Winer is calling on leading Democratic hopefuls -- who have, one and all, turned to the Internet as their primary organizing and fundraising tool -- to pledge to keep the Internet free and open, opposing the Broadcast Flag and other measures that break end-to-end and compromise freedom and innovation.

Both Clark and Dean have raised prodigious amounts of money on the Internet. Now, how about using that money to keep the Internet free. And even better if Dean and Clark make a joint statement about this, that no matter who gets nominated, they will work to fight control of the Internet by the media companies. The Democratic Party has a very spotty record on support of the Internet. By making the statement in unison, that would change, overnight, the political balance.

Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:59:15 PM permanent link to this entry

iTunes, Napster, meet MSFT.
Microsoft announces plans to open a music-download service in early 2004. Link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:32:06 PM permanent link to this entry

David Weekly on OPG v Diebold case in court today
Today, a federal judge will hear arguments that will determine whether or not e-voting manufacturer Diebold Systems can use the DMCA to force 'Net users into removing links to online discussion archives stolen from Diebold earlier this year. Those archives contain dialogue in which Diebold employees talk online about problems with the company's e-voting products.

In the case being heard today, the nonprofit ISP known as Online Policy Group (OPG) and two students from Swarthmore College argue Diebold is exploiting copyright law in order to silence criticisms about the security and reliability of their digital voting systems. Representing them: The EFF and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw. Last week, I caught up with Online Policy Group (OPG) Colocation Director and Board member David Weekly for a quick IM chat on the case, which you can read in entirety here.
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:11:32 AM permanent link to this entry

Toronto Board of Ed shafting alternative schools
Laura James, Co-Chair of the Toronto Alternative Primary School Council is getting the runaround from the Toronto District School Board, who have all but declared war on alternative education in the city. She's looking for help from other people involved in Toronto's alternative schools in refuting the Board's claims.

We are being told by the TDSB that our current council "set up" is not recognized by the Board but yet my calls to several "regular" schools indicate that many others schools have separate Incorp entities / charities that fundraise the way we do and that the School Advisory Council is for Policy only.

I would like to get some feedback on how other "Alternative Schools" are set up.

Singing, sample-driven website
Let Them Sing It For You: a Swedish site that takes a phrase as its input, and then "sings" it by playing it back, word-by-word, from a library of sampled words from pop songs. Link (via Daily Notes)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:00:26 AM permanent link to this entry

Send back your MP3s
Do you feel remorse over all the MP3s you've downloaded? This site has the answer: send them back!

1. Look up the email address of your regional RIAA authority (listed in your white pages under "Recording Industry: Regional Authorities)

2. Open up your email program, such as Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express

3. Create an email to the email address you found.

4. Attach all the MP3s you're returning

Vanity tinyURLing
Erik Olsen writes,

So, we all started "tinyurling" our names

http://tinyurl.com/evo (my init) is rather odd.

http://tinyurl.com/erik leads to a dead link (sob!)

http://tinyurl.com/pnh is, well, Swedish. I think.

http://tinyurl.com/cory , however, May Well Lead To The Truth(tm).

Anyhow. Rules are simple, link is 1-4 chars after the tinyurl.com/

Tumors grow just like animals
The same equations used to model animal growth also describe the growth of tumors:

As an animal's mass increases, so does the number of cells within it. But the blood supply that feeds those cells grows more slowly. As a result, an increasing proportion of the available nutrients go towards maintaining existing cells rather than the growth of new ones, so the rate of growth slows and ultimately comes to a halt...

When they compared their predictions to the growth of 13 rodent or human tumours, they found the tumours' growth closely followed the same universal law.

Daily funnies as RSS
Now this is a fantastic idea: daily comic-strips syndicated as RSS feeds -- who needs a separate "comics reader" when an RSS aggregator can suck in anything that can be represented as a syndicated feed?

Adam@Home by Brian Basset http://dwlt.net/tapestry/adam.rdf 2003-08-03

B.C. by Johnny Hart http://dwlt.net/tapestry/bc.rdf 2003-08-25

Big Nate by Lincoln Peirce http://dwlt.net/tapestry/bignate.rdf 2003-08-11

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ch.rdf 2003-06-09

Dilbert by Scott Adams http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf 2003-06-06

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau http://dwlt.net/tapestry/doonesbury.rdf 2003-06-13

Drabble by Kevin Fagan http://dwlt.net/tapestry/drabble.rdf 2003-08-11

For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston http://dwlt.net/tapestry/fbofw.rdf 2003-08-03

Government documents and the librarians who love them
Amazing gallery of photos of government document librarians posing with their fovorite govdocs. I used to work at a Business and Urban Affairs collection at one of Toronto's bigger libraries -- it's amazing what governments publish.

1. The Adventure of Echo the Bat / Kimberly Kowal
2. Air House, A History by Perry D.Jamieson / Paula Fox
3. This is Ann [anopheles mosquito]...she drinks blood! (1943) / Anna Hobbs
4. Annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. 1913-1914 / Randy Smolnikar
5. Assorted Publications / Future Farmers of America

Domo-kun phone
It's not clear to me whether this is a phone, a phone-cozy, a homemade phone-mod or a photoshop job, but whatever it is, I want one. Link (via KoKoRo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:15:08 AM permanent link to this entry

Photoshop effects tutorial
Great tutorial explaining how to use Photoshop to create four different after-effects (Soft Focus, Drawing, Moody, Lomo) and then encapsulating all the steps as macros you can install. It's a great and dinstinctively Internet-era means of instruction: "Here is a set of steps that can be used to make a tool; here is a packaged tool -- you can use the packaged tool, but now that you understand how it was made, you can also make your own variants." Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:12:40 AM permanent link to this entry

What's up with Technorati
David Sifry's Technorati service -- a blogmining and analysis system that can tell you the shape and velocity of the blogosphere at any given moment -- has been cranky and creaky for a couple days now. Sifry has posted an update to his blog, with info on how things are going and the difficulty of keeping pace with blogging's amazing growth.

Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.

RSS explained
RSS -- the little technology with the big, big list of acronym-expansions -- has even more acronym expansions than heretofore suspected; Google definitions has the scoop:

Repetitive stress syndrome that is caused by repetitive movement (causes Carpal Tunnel Syndrome when occurs at wrist/hand)

(Regional Subscription System) The system by which U S WEST processes Equal Access information that allows end users to obtain service from their Interexchange Carrier of Choice.

Radio Science Subsystem (orbiter science investigation)

Sunday, November 16, 2003

French porn director John Root now has a blog
Famous French adult film director John B. Root, nee John Guillore, has launched a self-described "sexblog" about his life and the porn biz: Inkorrekt, the Diary of a Pornographer. Not long ago, Root was the author of an open letter protesting a French ban on TV porn organized by right-wing and "family values"groups.

"Porn's subject matter is physical love, a theme that has produced countless masterpieces in painting, in sculpture and in literature," wrote Root. "If celluloid sex has never succeeded in hoisting itself to the rank of a cinematographic or televisual genre, it is because we have denied it the right to be economically viable. We wouldn't be having this debate if porn was what it should be: joyous, well-made, aphrodisiac art, respectful of its actors and its audience, portraying real people and making sense of its subject matter."

Link to John B. Root's blog (written in French, and not worksafe), Link to Guardian interview with Root (snip: "There's no earthly reason why a porn film shouldn't also be a good film. I want the product to respect me." ) (Merci, Jean-Luc!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:51:57 AM permanent link to this entry

Good-Turing method finally improved-upon
Sixty-or-so years since Alan Turing and IJ Good invented the Good-Turing method for modeling of probability distributions behind data streams as part of the Allied code-breaking effort, researches have discovered the limit of its usefulness, and produced a replacement method that transcends them:

The German Enigma encryption machine used a huge number of decryption keys, making it almost impossible to crack the code. British intelligence had gained possession of Enigma machines, had determined how they worked and had even obtained a copy of the full book of keys. Some messages had been decrypted and the keys used recorded, so that the code breakers had a small sample from a very large set of keys. But it was unlikely the Germans would continue to use the same keys, so some method of assigning a probability distribution to the keys not yet used was needed...

Orlitsky was able to discover this limit by quantifying the problem in terms of the positive integers. The nature of the sample set is actually irrelevant to the probabilistic algorithm. What matters is the order in which outcomes appear and how often they appear. So a sample sequence such as giraffe, giraffe, elephant, giraffe, zebra would be encoded in numbers as 1,1,2,1,3. Every time a new item appears, it is assigned the next-highest number, so that this mathematical model, according to its creators, can capture the worst possible problem-one in which there is an infinite number of hidden data items.

Secret Epcot VIP lounges revealed
Epcot Center had the distincition of being the first Disney park in which every single ride and pavillion was sponsored -- in the case of the World Showcase, the sponsors were the countries represented; but in the case of the Future Showcase, the sponsors were tech companies, and they built VIP lounges and conference spaces into their ride-pavillions for their bigwigs and guests. Hidden Mickeys has a ride-by-ride description of Future Showcase's VIP lounges (I found out about this through an eBay listing for a Living Seas VIP Lounge uniform jacket)

Around the right side of The Living Seas, past the Coral Reef restaurant, there is a door marked only by the United Technologies Corporation logo. Press the buzzer by the door, display your pass and you will be allowed access to the VIP lounge and the conference center beyond it. (George Bush was received in the conference center in 1990.) The conference center is on the second floor of The Living Seas and has huge windows that look into the tank. You can see these windows when you are in the attraction by looking for the restaurant windows. The second set of windows above the restaurant are those of the conference center. The conference center is currently closed but is frequently used to receive VIPs including Michael Eisner.

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Silvery Roger Wood clock
I love coming home, firing up my mailer and finding a new Roger Wood clock in my in-box. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:42:24 PM permanent link to this entry

Sexy Math
BoingBoing patron saint Bruce Sterling points our dirty minds to a website containing this suggestive series of images created entirely from mathematical algorithms. "If you find them offensive in any way," says the site's creator, "all I can say is that beauty (or obscenity) is in this case most certainly in the eye of the beholder." If high school algebra had been half this fun, perhaps I would have passed. Link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:26:17 PM permanent link to this entry

Privacy-consciousness-raising stickers
The Austrian cyber-activists Quintessenz put on the local Big Brother Award ceremony. To promote it, they distributed these stickers that look like hidden cameras, encouraging people to put them up in toilets and other places where privacy matters. The caption means "The Most Shameless Surveilleur." 116k PDF Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:52:39 PM permanent link to this entry

Secret cameras revealed!
How to find hidden cameras:

Some methods to hide cameras solely rely on the way human perception works. A very simple way to "hide" a camera is to install it at a large distance from the space to be surveilled. This does not restrict the usefulness of the camera images in any way because tele lenses can be used to compensate for the distance. For this application there is no need for subminiature cameras, although these are even easier to hide. Standard surveillance cameras painted the right color are very hard to spot and usually have a CMount or CS-Mount 7 socket which is needed for attaching the necessary high quality tele lens.

Secret documents revealed!
The Austrian techno-activist group Quintessenz has created a sizable archive of secret documents; they want your contributions:

All the doquments in this section are being published here for reasons of scientific research only. They have been collected mainly from various open sources on the internet. Our sole intention is to inform the public about what is being done to their personal data right now in the digital networks.

We just preserve here what governments, various international bodies and certain IT companies did not care to publish or took off the net.

Secrets of drivers' licenses revealed!
It turns out that drivers' license numbers contain coded information about your name and other details. If you're going to verify -- or generate -- a driver's license number, you need to know about this:

Soundex is a hashing system for english words. You might want to look at further information on how soundex works.

The example soundex is F255, so the example name starts with F, so the name starts with an F, followed by a gutteral or sibilant, followed by a nasal, followed by another nasal. This is correct, as the example person's last name is "Fakename"

For my license generator, I simply implement this. For my license reverser, I simply take likely guesses. I also generated the Soundex code for the top 10,000 (ish) last names in the US, and I suggest the top 10 for any given code.

3D London Tube
These 3D rendered London Tube maps are pretty mind-blowing. Link (via Blackbelt Jones)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:23:15 PM permanent link to this entry

My NYT Mag piece on robots
I wrote a piece on home robotics for the New York Times Magazine as part of a section on Home Automation with contributions from James Gleick, Paul Boutin, Clive Thompson and others; it shipped today:

Home robots were the jet-pack future's sweetest lie: personal assistants working tirelessly and without complaint -- companions, servants and pets. They would be nimble and able, and computers would be blinking omniscient behemoths.

How wrong they were. Just as millions of users defied the first engineers' narrow visions of what a home computer could be, and figured out how to make PC's bend to their will, the cheapness and flexibility of commodity computer components are now enabling a new hobbyist revolution in home robotics. C.P.U.'s -- the brains of a PC -- are cheap like borscht, and the sensors that allow computers to see, hear, feel and smell have likewise plummeted in cost. (Pinhead digital cameras, for example, are so cheap these days that it's hard to find a pocket-size gizmo that doesn't have one built in.) All it takes to turn these pieces into a robot is packaging the brains and the senses atop a mobile platform and stirring in some clever code.

Cellphone jammer
The SH066P Personal Cell Phone Jammer is disguised as a phone, has an effective radius of 10-15 yards, and comes in US and worldwide frequency-flavors. They're illegal to use in most places, but (usually) not illegal to possess, build or sell. I'm as bugged by mobile abuse as the next person, but using one of these strikes me as a much greater breach of the social contract than talking too loudly or subjecting your coachmates to the default Nokia ring. Link (via Gizmodo)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:10:33 AM permanent link to this entry

Censorware thinks blogs are unsavory
SurfControl, a censorware vendor, has roped off blogs from some of its customers' machines. That means that if your workplace, library or school relies on SurfControl to keep naughty pages away from its computers, you can't get at blogs, either.

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the federal mandate requiring libraries to censor their terminals, companies like SurfControl control more than surfing: they control basic access to information. Link (via Dan Gillmor)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:57:42 AM permanent link to this entry

Owner Override: a proposal to fix Trusted Computing
My collegaue Seth Schoen has written an audacious article for Linux Journal in which he calls on the architects of "Trusted Computing" [TCPA|TCG|Palladium|NGSCB] systems -- which ostensibly solve some of the Internet's security problems by adding cryptographicallly secured tamper-detection to the hardware of the commodity PC -- to add a feature that he calls "Owner Override."

Trusted Computing proposals have drawn fire as tools for lock-in and other anti-competitive strategies; Seth's Owner Override allows the owner of a computer to override the Trusted Computing security when it is in her own interest.

For example, you could use Owner Override to tell a "lie" to your bank, which insists that you use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access its website, and convince the bank's webserver that your copy of Opera or Safari or Mozilla is really Internet Explorer. This is possible (even routine) today, but in a Trusted Computing universe, it will be impossible, modulo Owner Override.

Fortunately, this problem is fixable. TCG should empower computer owners to override attestations deliberately to defeat policies of which they disapprove. Giving the owner this choice preserves an essential part of the status quo: third parties can never know for sure what's running on your PC. TCG already defines a platform owner concept. The TCG specification also should provide for a facility by which the platform owner, when physically present, can force the TPM chip to generate an attestation as if the Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs) contained values of the owner's choice instead of their actual values.

APIs and a clear user interface for the override mechanism could be specified by an appropriate TCG committee. Only the platform owner should be able to do this; whenever a machine provides an inaccurate attestation, it does so for what its owner considered an appropriate reason. This change would do nothing to undermine the basic security benefits of the TCPA hardware, including those outlined in the Safford article; you still could tell whether your computer had been altered.

Artists' own album covers
The Art Rocks asked 100 artists to produce album covers for their favorite musicians. It turns out that Kurt Vonnegut is also a painter, and a Phish fan. Link (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:29:12 AM permanent link to this entry

Worldchanging: tools for building sustainability, democracy and open systems
Worldchanging is a new group blog "covering tools for building sustainability, democracy and open systems." Lots of interesting stuff up there right now, including this Brian Eno challenge:

Tonight, at a rousing lecture sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, Brian Eno described his next undertaking. It's a book, 250 Projects for a Better Future.

Like most good ideas, the premise is deceptively simple: can we describe the 250 projects most critical to building a better future?

Friday, November 14, 2003

Frogs have accents
A researcher has recorded frog-calls and discovered regional accents among them.

Bernie Simmons, a spokesman for SPSS, said it was thought the frogs migrated to the warmer climate of southern Europe during the last ice age where they separated into distinct colonies that slowly started to diverge.

Part of that diversity has emerged as regional accents.

The accents are different depending on whether pool frogs belong to the ancient Iberian, Italian or Balkan populations.

Nintendo 64 to be reborn as a $10^H^H^H 57 Euro console-in-a-controller?
The new Nintendo iQue, intended for the Chinese market, will reportedly cost $10 57 Euros, play $5 Nintendo 64 games, and fit into a game-controller. Link (via Gizmodo) Pete Rojas sez, "The Reg got the price wrong -- there's a typo: it should be 57 Euros instead of 7 -- so the iQue is gonna cost considerably more than $10."
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:05:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Presidential websites pretty much suck
Researchers at Optimization Week have done a study on the presidential campaign websites and concluded that they pretty much suck: bloated, inaccessible and noncompliant. Link (Thanks, Andy!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:54:54 AM permanent link to this entry

Real property rights to virtual game objects
The Terra Nova gaming groupblog reports that Second Life, a massively multiplayer online game, has amended its terms of service to allow players to "retain real world property rights in the virtual world products they produce." Link Update: here's the official press-release
posted by Cory Doctorow at 6:04:53 AM permanent link to this entry

The latest NYT plagiarism case: Bernie Weinraub
Choire on Gawker says:

Here we go again. Have all journalists figured out the only way to get a good book deal and some press is to plagiarize and invent stories? Or is there some sort of airborn virus at the Times? Look for an act of contrition in the Times' corrections tomorrow. What's even odder is that Weinraub borrowed from the highly unusual source of LukeFord.net.

Link directly to the middle of a RealMedia stream
Rich Persaud has developed a tool to allow you to link the middle of RealMedia streams -- so that you can, for example, reference a particular moment in a video of a presidential debate and link directly to the timecode for that moment. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 1:07:32 AM permanent link to this entry

Cool new concept monowheel
Embrio, Bombardier's new concept monowheel -- balanced by gyros -- is pretty cool looking, and like all good vaporware vehicles, it is powered by magic hydrogen fuel-cells. Also: night-vision and ATV-style active suspension. I love the fact that the lines are visibly CAD-generated. You can almost see the nurb and spline handles depending from the curves. Link (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:45:45 AM permanent link to this entry

Ruminator Books's auction
Ruminator Books, an indie bookseller in St Paul, MN, is in dire financial straits and is holding an auction in order to keep its doors open.

An original piece of artwork from Ralph Steadman; Paul Auster's reading glasses; A hunk of wood from Rick Bass's writing cabin; Drawings from Siri Hustvedt and Oliver Sacks; A musical manuscript by Bill Holm; A copy of an early manuscript of 'The Laws of Our Fathers' signed by Scott Turow; T-shirts from Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford and Neil Gaiman; A first draft manuscript page from Charles Baxter; Rick Moody's electronic music CD; A letter written to Russell Banks by Jonathan Safran Foer on a piano roll of 'It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing'; A shirt given to Neal Karlen by Kurt Cobain; A Romanian flag given to Andrei Codrescu amidst gunfire during the 1989 revolution.; also: A limited edition of Mary Poppins (signed on D.L. Travers deathbed); valuable broadsides and handmade books; sports memorabilia; a brownie recipe; a pen blessed by the pope;and a portable personal altar with angel cards; And much more...

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Pearson Intl Airport threatens to sue websites that take its name in vain
Pearson International Airport, of Toronto, Ontario, has threatened legal action against a website for mentioning its name. The site in question is urinal.net, a user-submitted gallery of pissoir photos -- including a couple from Pearson. Inexplicably, Pearson has the surplus budget laying about with which to pay some puffed up dillweed to send letters to urinal-gallery sites, threatening to sue them for illegally (sic) putting the name of the airport on said site. I think that some goddamned budget-cuts are in order at Pearson.

The GTAA [Greater Toronto Airports Authority] would like to request that you remove Toronto Pearson International Airport from the title of the page below, including the removal of Toronto Lester B. Pearson International Airport from within the page. If you choose to keep the photos, we just request that you remove the text below in red. We appreciate your cooperation. We will check back in a week to ensure that this information has been removed. If at that time it has not, we will forward it to the Legal department for subsequent action.

Le cinema du Paris: let the lofty sextape critiques commence!
A review of the oh-so-48-hours-ago PHST (Paris Hilton Sex Tape), on "Noted Film Critic and Swede" Bergmann Endresson's blog. What's next, a tete-a-tete with James Lipton? A three-way with Roger Ebert? A new cinematic school of doggy-style Dogme?

The cold black of night is penetrated by an alien tone, played upon an inhuman scale. It pierces through the quiet slumber that is the inheritance of honest men.

As when Psyche dripped her voyeur wax upon the forbidden face of love, a sprightly nymph stirs, and all is a flutter:

"Let me get my phone."

Paris Hilton's first line in this magnificent post modern statement is more conditioned response than free will. Like Pavlov's doggy, she is powerless to resist the cold intrusion of the technological sprawl that devours countrysides, bathrooms and budoirs with the same unyielding hunger. McLuhan promised us a Global Village, but nowhere did he say that it would be a tax haven, and on this evening the throbbing circuitry of a connected world demands the sacrifice of a media virgin. But she is not without an advisor. In this film Ms. Hilton acts opposite Rick Solomon, media mogul, giver of corporal knowledge. Yet he is more, and in a poignant moment of self-loathing which defines the entire encounter, Solomon blasphemes the very technology upon which he has built his empire:

"Fuck your phone."

Spy on CMU's wireless devices
Here's a real-time map of all the wireless devices using CMU's campus-wide network. Link (Thanks, Ophir!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:53:51 PM permanent link to this entry

WTF? Did Linkedin lose their domain name?
BoingBoing buddy Jason Calacanis points us to Linkedin.com, which -- instead of the Linkedin network site -- now defaults to a domain registrar temporary page. What's up? Someone forget to pay the domain name renewal bill? They just received $4.7 million in financing, so unless someone's buying their engineers a whoooole lot of Skittles and Red Bull, that can't be it. Whois shows that the domain still belongs to Linkedin, Inc. Could this be related to recent reports of patent conflict, backbiting, and incestuous dealmaking involving Linkedin, Tribe.net, Friendster, and a horde of hungry investors, hmmmm? Or what I suspect to be the real deal here -- our alien overlords have returned to earth in a shiny new spacecraft, and they want to eat all the online networkers first? Link. Thanks also to IHeartMena blog, who evidently noticed the news before any of us.

Update: Konstantin, co-founder of Linkedin, replies:

Just read the story on BoingBoing about people wondering where their LinkedIn is . . . no, no aliens; also, while tempting, we did not take off to Bermuda right after the financing :) . . . unfortunately, our domain name registrar messed up the renewal billing (it was set to auto-renew).

We notified them of the problem last night. They promised to fix it this morning, but now it's going to take until tomorrow morning. And then it takes 24 hrs to propagate across every server on the Internet. No fun -- especially the day of a big article in the Washington Post and a day after the one in the Wall Street Journal.

"Nevermind the Pollacks" author Neal Pollack calls the blog quits
Writer Neal Pollack, who penned this scathing comeback to a less-than-flattering New York Times review earlier this week, has decided to shut down his popular weblog. Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:57:03 AM permanent link to this entry

Songs inspired by spam subject lines
Here's a surprisingly good compilation of songs with titles taken from common spam subject lines, such as "You Are Being Watched," and "Look and Feel Years Younger." The full MP3s are available for download. My favorite is "Do You Measure Up." Link
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 9:19:25 AM permanent link to this entry

Kazaa to distribute Bollywood feature
Kazaa has inked a deal to simultaneously distribute a theatrically released Bollywood movie, using its DRM-based Altnet technology.

"The Bollywood movie market is growing at twice the rate of Hollywood, in terms of production and revenue. This is where the benefits of P2P technology become really clear," Sharman CEO Nikki Hemming said in a statement. "P2P technology offers the movie industry a huge opportunity to massively enhance its distribution and generate revenue."

Currency exchange parable fotonovela
The Towers of Hanoi, an Austrian true-life fotonovela about a guy who goes into a bank and changes 50 Euros for dollars, then the dollars for Euros, then back again, und so weiter, until only chump-change remains. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:58:57 AM permanent link to this entry

Obituary recursion
Richard G. "Noodle" Pearson, the obituary editor for the Washington Post, has died. His obituary is amazing.

"On a day when everyone else is writing about a snowstorm, we're writing about a city council member, the king of Burma, a junior high school geography teacher, a Nobel physicist, a jazz drummer, a baseball player. . ." he said in a 1996 interview. "As I tell people sometimes, God is my assignment editor."

Naked Lady Sushi parody website from Japan
BoingBoing pal Geisha Asobi points us to Takako Umemiya's NYO-TA-I-MO-RI-Project (Link), and says, "She is very funny!!!!" I don't speak or read Japanese, but maybe a better-educated BoingBoing reader can contribute a partial translation. Takako's website features her sashimi-clad body in an apparent spoof of the ongoing International Naked Lady Sushi Controversy (marginally work-safe, I suppose).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:15:38 AM permanent link to this entry

Naked Sushi Lady history, part three
Don't forget Stanley Kubrick: the milk ladies in Clockwork Orange. Okay, they're serving dairy products, not California rolls, but you get the idea. Link to full-size image, Link to previous BoingBoing post on the Naked Sushi Lady Controversy: one, two. (Thanks, Janet!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:38:49 AM permanent link to this entry

More Segway-inspired robotic fun
BoingBoing buddy and robotics whiz John Wiseman says:

Regarding Segway robotics, I thought you might be interested to know that DARPA funded development of a Segway-based common robotics platform (the "RMP"): Link. A group at CMU is working on a Robocup robot soccer team using the Segway RMP: Link. One cool thing about their work is that it's the first robot soccer team (as far as I know) that can play with and against humans on the field. Unfortunately they don't seem to have any images/video of that online; I saw some video at a conference a few weeks ago.

Also, check out this origami folding robot at CMU: Link.

Read a free excerpt from Gareth Branwyn's new robot book!
BoingBoing pal, StreetTech blog founder and Wired Magazine's "Jargon Watch" editor Gareth Branwyn says:

An entire chapter of my book Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots is now available on InformIT. Called Robot's Rules of Order, it is a collection of laws, maxims, words o' wisdom, and rules o' thumb used by robot thinkerers and tinkerers of all stripes. Also includes a section called "Rules for Roboticists," tips and working principles to keep in mind while building your own bots.

Central London WiFi map
This is a pretty good map of public WiFi hotspots, mostly (all?) pay-for-use. (also useful: the Hotspotted directory of London WiFi) 440K JPEG Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:19:13 AM permanent link to this entry

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex
Larry Niven's classic essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," which explores the likely outcomes of a Superman-Lois Lane union, is online, with permission:

Either Superman has gone completely schizo and believes himself to be Clark Kent; or he knows what he's doing, but no longer gives a damn. Thirty-one years is a long time. For Superman it has been even longer. He has X-ray vision; he knows just what he's missing. (*One should not think of Superman as a Peeping Tom. A biological ability must be used. As a child Superman may never have known that things had surfaces, until he learned to suppress his X-ray vision. If millions of people tend shamelessly to wear clothing with no lead in the weave, that is hardly Superman's fault.*)

The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles "a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack." One loses control over one's muscles.

Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?

Get fed up through your nose
Early clinical trials of an appetite-supressing nasal spray are promising:

The hormone in the spray, PYY (for Peptide YY 3-36), is what makes people feel full after a meal. It is made in the small intestine in response to food and then carried by the bloodstream to the brain, where it switches off the urge to eat. Obese people seem to make less of the hormone than lean people.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Lego fabrication, stylishly explained
Check out this amazing Flash pased pixelart/video-clip interactive tutorial explaining Lego fabrication: the perfect marriage of style and substance. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:43:45 AM permanent link to this entry

Naked Lady Sushi, part deux.
Seattle sushi restaurants aren't the first to serve food on the bodies of naked women, nor are various Japanese porn sites displaying X-rated human sashimi platter tableaus. Boingboing pal Eli the Bearded points us to this image by William Klein: Photograph of Models and the Surrealist Group around Meret Oppenheim's "Festin," 1960. The image was a fashion shot for Vogue magazine, under the title of Inaugural Feast in the March 1960 issue.

Link to image, Link to previous BoingBoing post.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:31:27 AM permanent link to this entry

Let the Paris Hilton Sextape Parodies begin
The first in what will no doubt be an endless number of Paris Hilton sex tape send-ups is here (via Gawker: "Hey, I Answer My Phone During Sex, Too!").

Looking for the (alleged) real thing? Check the spam in your in-box from countless pay-per-porn sites now planning to sell it, or try the suggestions at fleshbot. Update: An anonymous BoingBoing reader says that a Freenet file conveniently named CHK@PTVe670F51FwBLplnFNBqpvKtSALAwI,QYghmYcJkyVChzINXEdBhg may be said sex tape. As always, caveat downloader.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:06:52 AM permanent link to this entry

New Disinfo book: 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know
The subculture aficionados at Disinformation have released a new book. 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know is filled with "factoids about human health hazards, government lies, and secret history and warfare excised from your schoolbooks and nightly news reports." Tinfoil beanie cap not included. Within the bite-sized chapters, you'll find "irrefutable evidence" that:

* Nearly all American milk-cows are infected with Bovine Leukemia Virus
* One of the heroes of 'Black Hawk Down' was a convicted child molester
* The Bayer Company developed and marketed another "wonder drug": Heroin
* After 9/11, White House staff reviewed and considered a Special Ops presentation, Thinking Outside the Box: Poisoning Afghanistan's Food Supply
* Pope Pius II wrote a best selling erotic novel
* Positive HIV test results are wrong for half of all low-risk people
* Two atomic bombs were dropped on North Carolina
* You can mail letters for little to no cost using simple methods to fool the post office
* Senior auto industry execs characterize SUV drivers as "insecure and vain... nervous about their marriages... self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."

Neurology of love shows no emotion, only goal-seeking
The early stages of love are governed by parts of the brain that are used for goal-seeking and reward, and resembles obsessive-compulsive disorder:

The early stages of a romantic relationship spark activity in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward. The more intense the relationship is, the greater the activity.

The regions associated with emotion, such as the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship.

Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: VoIP crackdown
On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Madeline Brand about the boom in consumer voice-over-IP telephony, recent efforts by states to regulate, and the FCC hearings on December 1. As an increasing number of formerly state-run monopolies overseas open up to competition, a global 'net telephony boom seems imminent -- who doesn't want lower phone bills? What will be the cultural impact of a technology that makes a call to the other side of the world (or anywhere else) as cheap as an e-mail or IM? Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:34:34 AM permanent link to this entry

Nicotine is kind-of good for your brains
New evidence suggests that a nicotine metabolite improves memory and combats Alzheimer's.

Nicotine made a significant difference in the animals' performance in the tests. Low and high doses of nicotine altered behavior in opposite directions: The low-dose group tended to learn faster and the high-dose group tended to learn slower than the control animals. "Whether performance improved or declined is probably less important than the demonstration that nicotine does produce long-lasting changes in the animals' performance, presumably reflecting long-lasting effects on brain development," says Robert Smith, PhD.

Licensed character breakfast cereal gallery
Ralston -- now a division of General Mills -- is the cereal company best known for Cookie Crisp and Chex, but the company also had a sideline in short-lived, craptacular cereals based on licensed characters from GI Joe to Rainbow Brite to Slimer. Some of the most forgettable are gathered into this annotated gallery. Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:18:13 AM permanent link to this entry

Segway-Based Robot Opens Doors
BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says,

"In this short article, Technology Review tells us that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have built a new robot, named Cardea, which is able to push open doors and has the bottom half of a Segway scooter. Cardea will be five feet tall with a torso, three arms, a variety of sensors, and a human-like head with expressive features and vision, and mounted on a Segway base. More details and references are contained in this review which also includes several pictures. For even more details, go to the Cardea Project homepage."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:09:09 AM permanent link to this entry

Better Lorem Ipsum with JanusNode
JanusNode is a MacOSX app that generates and munges text according to a number of rules. It can "ee cummings-ify" arbitrary text:

Dan Gill
  mor's
           on
     his
  annual teaching
           stint
          in
           Hong
      Kong,

Sputnik ships new AP
Sputnik has shipped the latest version of its WiFi router, built out of commodity hardware, running an open, Linux-based firmware, with tons of cool management and access-control/connection-throttling services. At $185, it's a lot cheaper than other "managed" APs and not so much more expensive than a bog-standard Linksys router. Link (via WiFi Net News)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:02:32 AM permanent link to this entry

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Merriam-Webster stands its McGround
Despite having taken down its Web defintion of McJob, Merriam-Webster has now publicly announced that it will not remove McJob from the print and pay-for-click versions of the dictionary.

"For more that 17 years 'McJob' has been used as we are defining it in a broad range of publications," the company said, citing everything from The New York Times and Rolling Stone to newspapers in South Africa and Australia.

FCC moving to break VoIP
David Isenberg points out that federal regulators have Voice-Over-IP telephony (see below) squarely in their sights, and are working hard to make it just as broken and screwed up as the old phone system:

I've known for several weeks that the FCC will be holding a hearing on Voice Over Internet Protocol on December 1. I had thought it would be like the delightfully informative and informal Rural Wireless Internet Service Provider Workshop that the FCC held on November 4. But this is not to be.

Apparently the December 1 meeting is to be a formal FCC hearing designed to legally circumvent the more normal, deliberative Notice of Inquiry process, which is designed to solicit, collect and consider a wide range of public comments. The FCC is in a hurry. "Things have greatly accelerated over the last year," writes Powell to Wyden, "and so have the FCC's actions."

VoIP use-case: mindblowingly cheap telephony
Dan Gillmor's on his annual teaching stint in Hong Kong, but he's still on the job for his newspaper in San Jose. Normally, this would entail enormous phone bills and patient hand-holding by email for Americans who've never dialled an overseas number in their life. But this time around, Dan's got a Voice-Over-IP box plugged into the Ethernet in his place in China and a phone plugged into that. This box is a portable phone-number: dial a number in San Jose, and it rings in Hong Kong (or wherever Dan has plugged it in). So all of Dan's communications with the home office are free. What's more, the long distance charges for US-Hong Kong on the service are only $0.05/minute, so Dan can simply forward his VoIP number to a Hong Kong prepaid mobile phone and take his San Jose number on the go with him throughout the city.

Companies around the world are already moving to VoIP in big numbers; now it's getting easy enough -- and the quality is getting good enough -- for individuals and families.

This shift is inexorable due to the nature of technological improvement. The main questions are a) how soon; and b) how the existing phone companies and regulatory agencies will deal with that reality.

CVS as a means of keeping track of your life
This is a habit of the alpha-geeks if ever there was one: Joey Hess keeps all of his email, config files, and all of his work files in a CVS repository. CVS is a free software tool that programmers use to keep track of, and synchronize, changes to documents. It's optimized to keep groups of people spread out over time (multiple versions) and space (multiple contributors) in synch, but Joey's had the key realization that he, on his own, is separated from himself by time (the file he edited yesterday, last month, last year) and space (his laptop, his desktop, his work computer). Keeping everything in CVS means that he can keep all of his user-environments in synch, it means that he never loses data. This is the kind of thing that Passport is meant to solve, and the sort of thing that LifeLog was supposed to do, but Joey's solution has the signal advantage of using free software with a robust developer community that is completely, 100 percent under his control.

It only took a few more weeks before the advantage of having a history of everything I'd done began to show up. It wasn't a real surprise because having a history of past versions of a project is one of the reasons to use CVS in the first place, but it's very cool to have it suddenly apply to every file you own. When I broke my .zshrc or .procmailrc, I could roll back to the previous day's or look back and see when I made the change and why. It's very handy to be able to run cvs diff on your kernel config file and see how make xconfig changed it. It's great to be able to recover files you deleted or delete files because they're not relevant and still know you've not really lost them. For those amateur historians among us, it's very cool to be able to check out one's system as it looked one full year ago and poke around and discover how everything has evolved over time...

I'm told that the best backups are done without effort--so you actually do them--and are widely scattered among many machines and a lot of area so that a local disaster doesn't knock them out. They are tested on a regular basis to make sure the backup works. I was doing all of these things as a mere side effect of keeping it all in CVS. Then I sobered up and remembered that a dead CVS repository would be a really, really bad thing and kept those wimpy backups to CD going. But the automatic distributed backups are what keep me sleeping quietly at night. Later, when I left that job, the last thing I did on my work desktop machine was: cvs commit ; sudo rm -rf /. And I didn't worry a bit; my life was still there, secure in CVS.

PVR anxiety: the tyranny of the to-do list
I ditched my TV and my cable and my beloved TiVo a couple months back (saving money, saving time), and one of the first things I noticed is that I lost a huge amount of unconscious anxiety that I'd been lugging around: every time I turned on my television, I'd be confronted with a "to-do" list from my TiVo, all the shows it had captured that I hadn't watched yet.

When I first got my TiVo, having a lot of programming on the drive felt like someone had done me a large favor; but over time, it felt almost like a nag: here's all this "work" I've got piled up for you to do.

Of course, this isn't specific to TiVo -- any PVR has this effect, as does an RSS reader, mail reader and so on: the unread/unwatched/undealt-with flags that define my life multiply, and my personal time does not.

I'm not the only one: Sign on San Diego has a piece on other PVRs owner who're drowning.

"For something that is supposed to be relaxing and unwinding at the end of the day, you (think) 'Wow! I have a lot of shows to watch,'" said Scott Bedard, technology director at an online media company in San Francisco...

"I get to the point now where I skip going to the gym so I can keep up with watching "Dawson's Creek" reruns," which are broadcast for two hours each day, he said. "I look forward to when they end so I won't be stressed."

Digital/Analog fusion art: Justin Wood
From the online portfolio of artist Justin Wood: "neuro.case," shown at left (2002) is "an illustration element for a book based off an excerpt from William Gibson's Neuromancer; mainly a portrait of the main character, Case. The book, antique future, was published by the artcenter college of design.... 25"x23" digital/acrylic/housepaint on paper."

Link to artist's online portfolio, which also includes this Gibson-inspired image. (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:20:43 PM permanent link to this entry

Naked lady sushi
The hottest Japorn export since bukkake? Or a dehumanizing, exploitative stunt? The provocative trend of presenting sushi on the body of an au naturel female model migrates to the US. Chaos ensues. Please, please, be careful with the wasabi. Snip from Seattle Times story:

Chopsticks at the ready, patrons line up. Hours earlier, across town on the campus of the University of Washington, eight activists, mostly Asian-American women, express outrage at what they call the prostitution of sushi and the exploitation of women. They plot their strategy. (...)While the promoter and the sushi model say this melding of prandial and sexual is performance art, Bonzai's patrons --men and women of various ethnicities --say it merely adds to the restaurant's sensual vibe. Opponents say treating women like a serving platter reinforces attitudes that make domestic and sexual violence so prevalent.

More Seatman photos
Here are a few more photos of the seatman, sent to me by a person who wishes to remain anonymous.

The poor guy had to sit on this red strap while crossing the border. Link to bigger photo

He looks very hot and fatigued. I hope they didn't keep him sitting there long. Link to bigger photo

The original photo, only larger. Link to bigger photo

UPDATE: A Boing Boing pal pointed me out to the nice pics of Dashboard Lady, too. Link
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 3:27:04 PM permanent link to this entry

Digital Identity World audio online
The Digital Identity World has posted complete audio, in a variety of formats, of all the presentations, along with the slides and so forth. I'm pretty happy with how the DRM panel I moderated (10.2MB MP3) turned out. Link (Thanks, Alice!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:08:18 PM permanent link to this entry

Tony Perkins has invited you to whitewash his fence
Hilarious running commentary on an email that Red Herring founder Tony Perkins wrote to the readers of his Always On Blog about his forthcoming book on Google that he wants other people to research and write for him. (If Perkins can pull it off, good for him, I say.)

Writing a book is a very painful experience. And frankly, the only way I can pull this off under a tight deadline (I want it out before Google goes public), is to write it with AlwaysOn members. Writing a book is so painful, I find it easier if someone else does all the hard work. So I'm asking you, members of the AlwaysOn network, to give me all of your ideas.

People disguised as car parts trying to sneak into US.
US Customs site about people squeezing into cars, or masquerading as car parts, to cross the border in the U.S. Link (Thanks, Jeremiah!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:03:28 AM permanent link to this entry

Miami's homeless children have developed their own mythology
Miami street kids have created a bizarre, complex mythology that would make for a great movie.

"On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. 'Demons found doors to our world,' adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with 'black windows.' The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear."

Bush wants to shut down London while he visits
Bush is so frightened of his staunch allies in Britain that he is demanding that the city of London be practically shut down during his three day visit there.

American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protestors. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre.

Tiki & Lowbrow Art by Flounder
Excellent (and inexpensive!) original art by a fellow named Flounder. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:01:08 AM permanent link to this entry

How (not) to negotiate an intellectual property treaty
The Consumer Project on Technology is hosting a workshop in Miami on negotiating intellectual property provisions in free trade agreements. IP treaties have become the hot way for the US to strong-arm the rest of the world into giving it control over medicine, culture and industry abroad, and the CPTech group have the best ongoing advice for keeping your country from becoming a US client-state:

The goal of the workshop is to provide negotiators participating in the development of FTA's with a useful "toolkit" of information about basic IP law concepts; the IP provisions of various concluded and proposed FTA's; the implications of those provisions for cultural, scientific, and economic development; and the possible alternatives. In the course of the day, experts from South and North South America will participate in a series of topically organized panels on various IP topics, leading up to a general discussion of negotiating goals and strategies. The workshop will offer a wide range of perspectives on this important topic, along with an opportunity for the exchange of views among participants.

Eleven forthcoming novels (including mine) excerpted
Fantastic Metropolis has published exerpts from eleven forthcoming novels by Liz Willians, Peter Crowther, Leslie What, Jeff VanderMeer, and me, among others. The excerpts are here, and the link below goes straight to the excerpt from "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," one of my novels-in-progress, which currently stands at 75,000 words of about 100,000 in total, and will likely see print sometime in 2005.

Alan woke with something soft over his face. It was pitch dark, and he couldn't breathe. He tried to reach up, but his arms wouldn't move. He couldn't sit up. Something heavy was sitting on his chest. The soft thing -- a pillow? -- ground against his face, cruelly pressing down on the cartilage in his nose, filling his mouth as he gasped for air.

He shuddered hard, and felt something give near his right wrist and then his arm was loose from the elbow down. He kept working the arm, his chest afire, and then he'd freed it to the shoulder, and something bit him, hard little teeth like knives, in the fleshy underside of his bicep. Flailing dug the teeth in harder, and he knew he was bleeding, could feel it seeping down his arm. Finally, he got his hand onto something, a dessicated, mummified piece of flesh. Davey. Davey's ribs, like dry stones, cold and thin. He felt up higher, felt for the place where Davey's arm met his shoulder and then twisted as hard as he could, until the arm popped free in its socket. He shook his head violently and the pillow slid free.

The room was still dark, and the hot, moist air rushed into his nostrils and mouth as he gasped it in. He heard Davey moving in the dark, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw him unfolding a knife. It was a clasp knife with a broken hasp and it swung open with the sound of a cockroach's shell crunching underfoot. The blade was rusty.

Internet talk radio
W3W3 is an Internet talk radio program -- I did an interview with them a couple weeks ago at the Future of Money summit. Lots of interesting things up there. LInk
posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:56:48 AM permanent link to this entry

Merriam-Webster 0wnz0red by McDonald's
Jonas sez, "It appears that dictionary producer Merriam-Webster's has yielded under pressure from McDonald's. Yesterday, the word 'McJobs' disappeared from their web site's page with "new" words in the new edition. I have links to the google-cached version with the word still there - and a pdf-print of it - , and to the 'cleansed' page (and the code)." Link Terry sent a letter to the dictionarians and got this back: "You'll be glad to know that we have not removed the entry for McJob from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (which is available on-line by subscription at www.Merriam-WebsterCollegiate.com). Although we did alter some marketing text on our main Web site that quoted the entry, the dictionary itself remains unchanged."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:32:01 AM permanent link to this entry

Monday, November 10, 2003

Kevin Sites' blog: How a "sojo" files a live report -- or doesn't.
Kevin Sites, blogger and NBC News correspondent in Iraq, has posted a fascinating account of the unbelievable lengths to which solo journalists must go to file live satellite transmissions from remote battlefields. Equipment breaks, unexpected technical snafus come up, but news has to get through. Sometimes, the means disassembling gear to make a temporary laptop modem out of a videophone. Sometimes, that means your dinner becomes a tripod.

"At left -- adjusting the camera. See that dirt berm? That's Syria on the other side. See that guy with a gun? That's a new Iraqi border guard. Nice pose, huh. See that guy in camo -- that's Lt. Col. Arnold (he's going to be bummed because he wanted to take off his cold weather gear before going on camera -- too late. It's an Army macho thing).

See that guy behind the camera? That's me. See that tripod? It's a piece of crap -- one of the legs fell off en route to the border and will never be found. See that box of MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat)? That's my new tripod leg. See the Colonel's helmet? That's the counterweight that keeps the camera from tipping over. It's amazing how desperation can push you to new levels of creativity in the middle of the desert."

Swedish woodlands butter-footgear shock horror
Swedish hikers discovered 70 pairs of shoes in the woods, each pair filled with butter. No word on whether it was the very best butter.

A provincial spokesman says the buttered footwear ranges from sneakers to boots. There are even butter-filled high heels and tap shoes. Each contains about a pound of butter.

The province spokesman says they'd like to catch the person who did it and make them clean it up. He says it's going to create quite a mess when the butter starts to spoil.

Update: Erik sez, "It's an art project by German/Swedish photographer Boris Duhm who put the shoes on this mountain and filmed it and he will be showing it at an exhibition in Sweden in January. He forgot to tell the locals.
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:41:11 AM permanent link to this entry

Hill of Crosses
Amazing photos of the Hill of Crosses in Siauliai, Lithuania, a small hill where hundreds of thousands of crosses have been deposited by pilgrims since the town was raided by Teutonic Knights in the 14th Century. Link (via Geisha Asboi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:43 AM permanent link to this entry

Sunday, November 09, 2003

Merkins for virtual people
If your morph-porn is perfect save for the pubes, the virtual merkin is an $8 library that you can use to generate picture-perfect thatches.

This is a smart prop and it was formed to fit Victoria's default mesh with the Pubic Detail Dial set to 1.000...

3 Morphs are applied, which can be mixed as you like
- Mid Noise (default set to 1.000) allows you to control the roughness of the middle plane. Thus the look can be improoved when viewing the prop from side angles.
- Top Noise (default set to 1.000) does the same for the top plane.
- Gen Ctrl allows you to adjust the shape for existing genitals on the hip texture map.

Disney aping Pixar, going all-digital
Here's a great Slashdot article and discussion thread about Disney's abandonment of traditional, hand-drawn animation (which Disney has sworn, for years, it would never give up), in favor of 3D, computer-generated work.

Supposedly, all of their animators-- even staunch traditionalists such as Glenn Keane-- are being trained on 3D computer animation techniques. The last hand-drawn high-budget Disney feature scheduled for release is Home on the Range, which is due out next April. It appears that Disney is bowing to the supposed pressures of the market, even though the hand-drawn Lilo and Stitch was considered a success and the all-CG Dinosaur (done at Disney's now-defunct FX house The Secret Lab) was not. However, I believe there's another factor at work: Pixar's contract with Disney is set to expire soon, and the revered CG house has been making their own demands of Disney for the contract's renewal.

Well, helloooo, Fleshbot.
A new web magazine in blogtrepreneur Nick Denton's growing Gawker Media portfolio launches today. Fleshbot promises "all the porn that digital technology and distribution has made possible:" CGI, amateur girls, webcam guys, sex blogs, and plenty more juicy, geeky, NSFW goodies. Notably, the site combines gay and straight smut: will the unusual decision to mix genres tittilate or alienate? Either way, it's a ballsy move. From the FAQ:

"Q: I like straight porn. What's with all the gay stuff?
A: Fleshbot does not believe in the balkanization of pornographic desire. Fleshbot seeks to address and stimulate all varieties of tastes and sexualities. If you don't like what you see on the main page, simply use the text and graphic buttons in the sidebar to filter the content which most interests you."

Link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:35:55 PM permanent link to this entry

Captchas as random poetry
Patrick Swieskowski has written a scraper that sucks in four random captcha words from AOL Instant Messenger's sign-up screen and arranges them as serindipitous, random poetry. Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:47 PM permanent link to this entry

Infinitely expressive smileys
This highly tweakable smiley-generator is part of a computational semiotics project to refine the expressivity of machine-mediated communications. Link (Thanks, Hamish!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:12 PM permanent link to this entry

Adult magazines screwed by the Internet?
Interesting AP story about the web's impact on the economics of adult print magazines:

After 35 years in the business of titillating and offending, pornographer Al Goldstein says his magazine can't compete anymore. The audience is just as large, he says, but the Internet has transformed the product and its delivery. Just over a month ago, Goldstein stopped publishing Screw magazine and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, giving him a chance to cut costs, relaunch the magazine and refocus attention on his Web site.

Goldstein said circulation woes throughout the field show "we are an anachronism; we are dinosaurs; we are elephants going to the bone cemetery to die. ... The delivery system has changed, and we have to change with it if we want to survive."

Back and to the Left
"Back and to the Left" is a "scratch-video" composition produced by a Canadian video artist. It makes very witty use of classic film footage and a catchy tune to create an audiovisual composition. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:59 AM permanent link to this entry

Average Internet self-identity
Inter.Face is the winner of last year's Machinista Russian art festival. It invites visitors to drag and-drop graphic facial-anatomy elements to avatars of themselves; once the project ran through, all the avatars were combined and smoothed to generate an "average net self-identity." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:35:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Tetrapaks as pop art
The Viennese artists' group Monochrom has a web exhibit of Tetrapak milk cartons, treating Tetrapak design as a form of pop art:

The breakfast table and other battle sites of the packaging struggle between Burma and Belgium are the real exhibition sites of everyday consumer design, packaging nutrition and luxury foods, filling garbage sacks, but also focusing our aesthetic sensors. There is also a delivery of literature for the table, offering the possibility of studying a language in foreign contexts.

Since the collected examples not only come from shop counters and were saved from garbage death but have also been discovered in ditches and sinks during a situationist meandering through the world with trained eyes, there is also a link to securing evidence.

Dog Harry Potter Hallowe'en costume
There's a Dog Hallowe'en Parade in NYC -- who knew? Link (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:44:57 AM permanent link to this entry

Daily Show on Nat Heatwole
Amazing Daily Show segment on Nat Heatwole, the "blade runner" who stashed weapons on dozens of Southwest Air jets to prove that Homeland Security's invasive searches do nothing to secure our skies. 5.03MB Quicktime Link (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:38:34 AM permanent link to this entry

Michael Moore AV archive
The Unoffocial Michael Moore Media Archive is an enormous collection of unauthorized sound and video recordings of Moore's speeches, films, videos and so forth. Link (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 4:20:24 AM permanent link to this entry

High ersatzery from Farkistani photoshopper army
Good Fark photoshopping contest: come up with cheap imitations of well-known products, the cheaper the better. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:21:32 AM permanent link to this entry

We've had Napster since 1909, and the sky still hasn't fallen
In 1909, residents of Wilmington, DE, were able to subscribe to an online music service that piped phonograph recordings over their telephone lines and through loudspeakers. 1909 was one year after the sheet music publishers were told to get bent by Congress: see, they'd grown alarmed at the prevalance of unauthorized piano rolls and had asked the Congress for a Broadcast-Flag-like regime that would let them veto any new music tech that would endanger their business (like online music delivery), making it illegal. Congress told them to get lost. Good thing we rescued those idiots from themselves back in 1908 -- can you imagine a music industry where the most lucrative product in the market was sheet music?

It's a pattern: the Vaudeville artists sued Marconi over the radio -- which made them rich. The movie studios boycotted TV until Disney sold out to get the funds for Disneyland -- and TV rights made the studios rich. Jack Valenti told Congress that the VCR was the Boston Strangler of the film industry, and then it doubled his income through pre-recorded tape sales and rentals.

Now, of course, Congress has given up on saving the entertainment industry -- and us -- from itself. With the Broadcast Flag, new technologies will only come into the market if they don't disrupt the industries built on the old ones. And with the WIPO Broadcast Treaty in the works, it's fruitless to pray for some technology safe-haven where we'll be able to develop our gear in peace, far from the short-sighted, greedy lunacy of the entertainment companies. The FCC should be ashamed of itself.

When plugged up to a phonograph the subscriber's line is automatically made busy on the automatic switches with which the Wilmington exchange is equipped. Several lines can be connected to the same machine at the same time, if more than one happens to call for the same selection.

Each musical subscriber is supplied with a special directory giving names and numbers of records, and the call number of the music department. When it is desired to entertain a party of friends, the user calls the music department and requests that a certain number be played. He releases and proceeds to fix the megaphone in position. At the same time the music operator plugs up a free phonograph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the piece the connection is pulled down, unless more performances have been requested.

Saturday, November 08, 2003

McDonald's should get a dictionary and look up "trademark"
McDonald's misunderstands the nature of dictionaries: that is, to observe the language as she is spoken and document her. McDonald's is up in arms over Merriam-Webster's inclusion of "McJob" in its current edition. Naturally, McD's has trumped up a completely groundless trademark claim to back this up. Trademarks don't let you control how people speak -- they only allow you to stop other commerical outfits from confusing your customers; certainly, they don't give you the power to stop the reporting of the fact that English speakers use "McJob" to describe a crappy job.

Walt Riker, a spokesman for McDonald's, said the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant also is concerned that "McJob" closely resembles McJOBS, the company's training program for mentally and physically challenged people.

"McJOBS is trademarked and we've notified them that legally that's an issue for us as well," Riker said.

Chimp filmstar turns to painting
JWZ just got the coolest birthday present ever: a painting painted by Cheeta, the chimp who played opposite Johnnie Weismuller in the Tarzan movies.

The artist is now 71 years old and living in Palm Springs, Florida, enjoying his new career as a painter.

His name is Cheeta, and he's the world's oldest living primate.

Shirky on SemWeb
Clay Shirky has published a ringing denouncement of the Semantic Web, pointing out that this is a project that elides the hard bits and solves the easy bits -- it's not far off from the digital identity world, where 70 percent of the use cases are easy problems that could be solved with some new W3C form elements, and the remainder are deep, philosophical problems we've been arguing about since Roman times.

First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.

All the actual complexities of matching readers with books are waved away in the first sentence: "You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want." Who knew it was so simple? Meanwhile, the trivial operation of paying for it gets a lavish description designed to obscure the fact that once you've found a book for sale, using a credit card is a pretty obvious next move...

No one who has ever dealt with merging databases would use the word 'simply'.

Friday, November 07, 2003

Amazing sculptures by woman with Down Syndrome
"Judith Scott (born 1943), a fifty-five year old woman with Down's Syndrome, has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture, except that the notion of sculpture is far beyond Judith's understanding. As well as being mentally handicapped, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language." Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 3:31:36 PM permanent link to this entry

Fair Seuss on SCO
The Grinch Who Stole Linux:

SCO hated Linux! The GNU Linux season!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be that their heads weren't screwed on quite right.
It could be, perhaps, that their shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that their bank account was two sizes too small.

Economist replies to Valenti on Broadcast Flag
Arnold Kling has a PhD in Economics from MIT, and took great umbrage at Jack Valenti's characterization of the Broadcast Flag decision at the FCC as a victory for consumers. He's written an open letter to Valenti in reply.

I will not buy any device for the purpose of receiving HDTV. Instead, I will gladly purchase devices that will route packets via the Internet Protocol over that spectrum. In the neighborhood of my house, IP packets will take precedence over HDTV signals.

I recommend that other consumers adopt the Jack Valenti Spectrum Re-allocation. I am talking about massive civil disobedience of the FCC. Remember, anyone who receives television over cable or satellite will give up nothing by assigning higher priority to IP packets. For anyone who misses broadcast television, it would be better to give them taxpayer dollars to subscribe to satellite TV than for consumers to pay the Broadcast Flag hardware tax.

By re-allocating spectrum from HDTV to wireless IP, we can kill two legacy birds with one stone. We can hasten the demise of the phone companies--because with a wireless "last mile" the wireless Internet can replace traditional land lines and cell phones; and we can show Jack Valenti, the movie industry, and the television industry what it really means to "score a big victory for consumers."

Link-Fu contest: Here are the winners.
The votes are in. For this week's battle to find the most bizarre and obscure links on the web (background) there were many judges, and countless submissions: so, we have multiple winners. And no, those aren't hanging chads you see scattered around the floor of Link-Fu competition headquarters. That's just leftover confetti from the inauguration party last night. Today, my friends, a generation of Link-Fu masters is born.

* Christina James was the first to submit Koonago Factory. Comments: Several judges picked this one. Dark, violent Japorn featuring tiny cartoon fairy-doll women? What's not to like? (NSFW rating: some nudity and grossness, but nothing Rotten-grade).
* Wayne Mercier submitted The International Trepanation Advocacy Group. Comments: Invisible Cowgirl says, "Because nothing says scary like I Got a Hole Drilled in My Head personal testimonials."
* Steve Lew submitted Mutant Midget Interracial Lemon Porn. Comments: Xeni says, "Strange fruit. Mmmmmmm."
* Steve Mills submitted Coffee Table Wife. Comments: Warren Ellis liked it. Go figure.
* Lucas Emery submitted Aussie Scrotum Shop. Comments: Made Warren smile.
* Zach Rodgers submitted Ordo Magazine. Comments: Invisible Cowgirl says, "A beauty of a blog chock full of everything that's weird and wonderful on the web." (NSFW guide: Links to some sexually explicit stuff, but links to lots of other stuff, too).
* An anonymous Link-Fu Master Ash Kalb submitted Jesus is With You Everywhere. Comments: Xeni liked the scary trucker picture.
* Peace Rug and Wholesome Swimsuits came from from Judson. Comments: Mark thought they were weird, silly and fun.
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:17:19 AM permanent link to this entry

Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act
Several members of Congress who (now looking back with regret) voted in favor of Ashcroft's PATRIOT act are supporting a bi-partisan bill called the Benjamin Franklin True Patriot act, which will restore many of the Constitutional Rights that Americans had before Bush and his cronies gutted them.

Rep. Butch Otter, a conservative Republican from Idaho, joined Rep. Bernie Sanders, a liberal independent from Vermont, to call for the repeal of the PATRIOT Act provision Ashcroft claims to have never used [spying on the library habits of citizens -- Mark]. Otter had his own quote from the same founding father.

"It was Thomas Jefferson who said, 'In questions of political power, speak to me not of confidence in men, but bind them down from mischief with the chains of a Constitution,'" Otter said. "That mischief is what we're seeing today and could see tomorrow."

3) Both of these bills look like they're buried in committees. The last listed "significant action" on the Freedom to Read Protection Act was nearly six months ago. The Benjamin Franklin Act has been referred to five different committees.
Link (Thanks, Mack!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 9:35:09 AM permanent link to this entry

IRS has a $1MM tax-refund form

How much is Dubya's tax-break worth to the hyperrich? Enough that the IRS has a new (thanks, IAW!) form for the electronic deposit of a tax refund of $1 million or more. 28k PDF Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 8:29:52 AM permanent link to this entry

Web Zen: Hipster Zen
handbook
mr. hipster
free williamsburg
trucker hat
feathered hair
bingo
bumplist
terrorists
why hipsters suck
anti-hipster forum
not lost in translation
her
i hate nyc
six months ago

and, of course...
gawker [which we love, shamelessly. --XJ]
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:01:07 AM permanent link to this entry

Belkin router "upgrade" tries to sell you censorship
Belkin's new router firmware "upgrade" automatically redirects http sessions to a Belkin sell-page for some bullshit censorware filtering crap. That's some upgrade: from a router that routes packets to a router that pushes the antithesis of free expression.

In response criticism, a Belkin product manager came forward this week to confirm the behaviour was designed into the products as a way to make it easier for consumers to sign up to a free trial of its parental control software. Belkin's Eric Deming is keen to allay concerns about the technique which have produced sharp criticism of the company on the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup.

Bullshit EULAs good for something
You know the bullshit in software clickthrough agreements that says, "If you disagree, take this back to where you bought it for a refund?" A law student took his unopened copy of MSFT Office back to a shop with a no-returns policy and used it to force them to give him a refund. Link (Thanks, John!)
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:00:23 AM permanent link to this entry

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Antispam "Turing Tests" can't distinguish between the blind and software
The W3C has singled out "captchas" -- the pseudo-Turing-Tests intended to keep spammers form using automated tools to create freemail accounts in bulk -- as disastrous for the blind and other disabled users of the Internet, since they rely on sight and reading comprehension to work. IOW, it's not a good Turing Test if the blind fail it as often as a computer does. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:04:53 PM permanent link to this entry

Urban sport of"Parkour" for wannabe spidermans
Mindbending videos of a guy running up walls, jumping from building-to-building, etc. It's like a superhero come to life. Link (Thanks, Ben!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:56:50 AM permanent link to this entry

BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net turns 300
A few weeks back, BoingBoing reader Pauly M. and friends created a "BoingBoing tribe" at the online social networking site Tribe.net to "further the banter and chitchat that goes along with boingboing." The group appears to be growing, and just passed the 300Update: 400!-member mark.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 8:03:04 AM permanent link to this entry

Maher Arar: terrorist? Innocent computer scientist? It's who you know.
Maher Arar -- a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen who operated a computer consulting business -- was arrested by US officials during a stopover at New York's JFK airport, then and deported to Syria by the US government. The FBI flagged him as a "suspected terrorist." After year of torture in a Syrian prison (he describes having been beaten with objects including shredded electrical cables, and living in a urine-filled, rat-infested 3'x6'x7' "grave"), they seem to have decided he was innocent, and safe enough to ship back to Canada. From Joi Ito's blog:

Obviously, it's probably easier for a Syrian national to get on a "list" than a Japanese, but this really scary. They say he had had a relationship with another suspected terrorist who is also being imprisoned and tortured now in Syria. He says he barely knew the guy. So what does this mean for us? If we meet someone, we should not "become friendly" with them until we are certain that they are not a suspected terrorist. What does this mean? We need to make sure they don't hang out with other suspected terrorists. So if you believe in six degrees, it's likely at some point you will be a suspected terrorist.

How do they know if you hang out with someone? Friendster? LinkedIn? Your email? We need to be VERY careful about the privacy of not just the content of our communication, but the privacy of who we are in touch with, often called sigint, or signal intelligence. Seriously though, this will cause a chilling effect on meeting, calling, emailing or otherwise "being in touch with" anyone who you don't know very well that could land you on the "suspected terrorist" list.

Dashboard cig lighters are the new cup-holders
The automotive cig lighter has become a kind of lingua-franca for chargers of all descriptions -- this CNN piece calls it "the new cup-holder." The same thing is happening in USB: I charge virtually all of my devices (phones, PDA, etc) with retractable ZipLinq USB cables these days -- sure makes travelling easier.

In model-year 2004, there are 47 vehicles that come, standard, with five or six lighter sockets, according to Carsdirect.com. In 1998, no vehicles came with that many...

The Pink Pussycat Boutique, an "adult novelty" store in Manhattan, sells a variety of devices that can be plugged into car cigarette lighter sockets. We'll go no farther.

If you get a flat tire, Safetycentral.com sells a 12-volt impact wrench for removing lug nuts. Among other car lighter-friendly devices the site sells are a 20 oz. coffee pot, a frying pan, an oven, a curling iron, an electric cooler and a special adapter so you can plug multiple devices into one lighter. That way you can make breakfast, curl your hair, run your impact wrench and maybe light a cigarette while you wait for your beer to get cold.

Lab Notes: research from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering
My latest issue of Lab Notes is online. Please take a look!

* The first ever nanofluidic transistor manipulates proteins and DNA instead of data.
* Neutron beams detect the clandestine transport of nuclear weapons materials in shipping containers... by triggering fission reactions!
* Studying the basic physics of the San Francisco Bay helps preserve delicate ecosystems and protect our water supplies.
* Esoteric mathematics amp up productivity in the workplace, from sandwich shops to banks.
* ....and more!

Link
posted by David Pescovitz at 7:12:13 AM permanent link to this entry

Napster's Flash "Street" ad campaign
Napster Bad -- not. This series of flash shorts on the Napster.com site seem to be a sort of animated equivalent to the faux graffitti ad campaign. Both the posters and the shorts cast that be-headphoned mascot as a hunted rebel The Man just won't leave alone. Sure, it may smell like teen spirit -- but Old Napster it ain't, despite the conspicuous attempts at street cred. Link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:06:39 AM permanent link to this entry

Beasties exonerated for sampling
The 9th Circuit has ruled that the Beastie Boys' sampling of a three-note segment of James Newton's composition to the song "Choir" did not infringe Newton's copyright. Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 7:04:02 AM permanent link to this entry

WSJ breaks down lawyer's potential winnings from SCO v IBM
This WSJ article says attorney David Boies could see $49.4 million or more from representing SCO in its $3B lawsuit alleging IBM stole trade secrets over Linux software-- even if SCO's case is unsuccessful.

Documents SCO recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission say the Lindon, Utah, software firm "is in the process of finalizing" a deal with its counsel. Under the agreement, SCO would pay the lawyers 20% of the proceeds of "a sale of SCO during the pendancy of litigation." (...) In 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq SmallCap Market Wednesday, SCO was at $17.87, giving the company a market capitalization of $247 million. If SCO sells at that price, the Boies firm would be entitled to $49.4 million -- and probably more with the premium that usually comes in a takeover.

On your marks... get set... LINK-FU!
Link-Fu starts now! Here's a reminder, in case you missed Tuesday's post:

Link-Fu is an online competition where during a specific, pre-established period of time -- in this case, Thursday, November 6 from 9AM-12PM, Eastern Time -- you send us one url that links to some very weird something somewhere. Something so bizarre and wild and intriguing and fascinating, that no-one else (or as few nobodies as possible) has seen.

Judges: Warren Ellis, Invisible Cowgirl, Mark, Pesco, and yours truly. We declare a winner based on whatever we happen to like best. Not the grossest, not neccesarily Farkish or Rotten. Just the flat-out most bizarre -- though grotesquery is not neccesarily out of the question. In fact, here was last week's barfbag winner (WARNING: extremely distgusting, NSFW, Cowgirl found it). The winner wins the title of High Master of Link-Fu, until we hold the next battle.

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Mack White's conspiracy comics
I'm a longtime fan of Mack White's comics. He did a regular strip for the print edition of bOING bOING called Jokey, which used a secret language. Mack recently let me know about his terrific blog, which is loaded with weird conspiracy stuff (including a link to an article that looks into Gen. Wesley Clark's involvement in the Waco massacre). Here's a one page comic Mack did for The Comics Journal about the Kennedy assasination, and how the reason behind it is similar to the current war in Iraq. Link
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 1:39:30 PM permanent link to this entry

Smart Dust Gets Back to Nature
Here's a piece I wrote for TheFeature about using Smart Dust to monitor bird breeding on an island off the coast of Maine. (Smart Dust are small wireless sensors that can form ad-hoc networks.) Link
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:10:54 PM permanent link to this entry

Poison Ivy Awareness
I always thought it was easy to identify poison ivy. Three leaves, red-tinged, waxy appearance. But this site has set me straight. "Poison ivy is so adaptable that it grows under very different conditions, so it shows up looking different ways." Be sure to check out the gallery of rash photos, especially if you enjoyed the pics of my ringworm. Link (Thanks, Stefan!)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:04:22 PM permanent link to this entry

Gadgetgasm-inducing new products from Sony
Sony announces plans for a new, all-in-one, handheld gaming device: the PlayStation Portable is said to be digital music player, video player, mobile phone, and then some. An iPod rival is also in the works for 2005 release, with a projected street price of as low as $60 US. Link, pic via Gizmodo, Sony PDF presentation which includes detailed specs. (via unwired)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:02:51 PM permanent link to this entry

WIPO has crazy toilets
I'm in Geneva, representing EFF at the World Intellectual Property Organization meeting on the unbelievably misbegotten Broadcast Treaty, an Orwellian masterwork that makes the DMCA look like junior-high playground strong-arming.

The high point (other than working with the amazing coalition of activists that Jamie Love and the Civil Society Coalition have gathered here) was the utterly bizarre self-papering toilets in the WIPO building. I was so taken by these things that I had to shoot a movie -- I knew I could never describe them adequately with words alone. 675k AVI Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:56:41 AM permanent link to this entry

Todd Lappin takes over the Guestbar!
A warm thank you to Jason Scott for his wonderful secret histories of the online world! Now we welcome Todd Lappin to the Guestbar. I met Todd more than a decade ago when we were both interned in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Since then, he's been my advocate, editor, and collaborator at Wired and Business 2.0, helping bring some of my favorite work into print. A renaissance man, Todd can also be spotted tooling around San Francisco in his fully-outfitted Telstar Logistics company vehicle. Indeed, Telstar Logistics is the only firm I trust for my supply chain needs.
posted by David Pescovitz at 9:55:48 AM permanent link to this entry

Latest Kevin Sites blog-post from Iraq: Hearts and Mines
New photos and first-person accounts from northern Iraq, from MSNBC combat corrrespondent Kevin Sites:

"Well sir, it's been a rough deployment. This -- then the stuff at home -- my wife's probably cheated on me 15 times," he shakes his head and takes a long drag from the stub of his cigarette. Many of the men we see tonight are doing a version of the same thing, smoking -- shaking their heads.

"I looked around town today," one lieutenant told me, "I was hoping to find someone doing something bad, somebody I could hurt -- but there wasn't one. Just people that needed my help."

It's just that kind of mission whiplash that has confused and demoralized so many troops in Iraq. Soldiers are ordered to go on a night patrols or raids--where danger can lurk at every corner or behind every door -- and life and death decisions have to be made within the hair-fraction of time it takes to pull the trigger on M4 assault weapon -- then the next day, they're told to monitor the selection of a new local mayor or to rebuild a school.

First-ever VoIP telco?
Via Kevin Werbach's blog:

VC Fred Wilson announces that ITXC, Tom Evslin's VOIP backbone company, is merging with Teleglobe to form the world's third largest long-distance company. This is a significant development. Like several of us, Tom recognized years ago that VOIP was the future of the telephone business, but he actually did something to make it happen.

Human genome online
The data from the open-source project to map the human genome and release it to the public domain has put the genome online.

Ensembl presents up-to-date sequence data and the best possible annotation for metazoan genomes. Available now are human, mouse, rat, fugu, zebrafish, mosquito, Drosophila, C. elegans, and C. briggsae, Others will be added soon.

Unwired in Kashmir
Tourism officials in India's conflict-torn region of Jammu and Kashmir want to woo foreign tourists back with Wi-Fi:

"Two months ago, mobile phones were forbidden in tense Indian Kashmir. Now, anyone can wirelessly surf the Web from the houseboats and gondolas dotting the waters of its famous Dal Lake. (...) 'This facility... [will] tap travelers who would like to remain connected to the rest of the world,' Jammu and Kashmir state tourism chief Saleem Beig said Monday. 'It goes a long way in sending the right kind of signals to tourists.'

Link to CNN story, (via unwired, thanks shawn yeager)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 6:53:41 AM permanent link to this entry

400 year old Italian snatch art for sale on eBay
Someone's selling a "Rare wax anatomical model genital organ !!!" on eBay. The item is purported to be ca. 17th century, from the anatomical science division of Italy's University museum of Bologna. Link (Thanks, ESC)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 5:07:18 AM permanent link to this entry

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Roger Wood's exploding alarm-clock
I like the look of Roger Wood's latest: an exploding alarm-clock. That face is just marvellous. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:44 PM permanent link to this entry

Egg carving
Gallery of eggshells carved and sculpted using a high-speed rotary tool. Link (Thanks, Jed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:08:19 PM permanent link to this entry

Herring fart
It turns out that herring fart. It's not digestive gas, though. Scientists call it a Fast Repetitive Tick: a FRT.

Firstly, when more herring are in a tank, the researchers record more FRTs per fish. Secondly, the herring are only noisy after dark, indicating that the sounds might allow the fish to locate one another when they cannot be seen. Thirdly, the biologists know that herrings can hear sounds of this frequency, while most fish cannot. This would allow them to communicate by FRT without alerting predators to their presence.

FCC screws America, adopts Broadcast Flag, doom, gloom, armageddon
We've lost a round in the Broadcast Flag fight. The FCC today decided that it didn't need to listen to the tens of thousands of Americans that wrote to it, asking to have this terrible proposal set aside, and instead adopted a rule proposed by billionaire movie studios whose biggest problem is figuring out how to spend the riches they made off the VCR after we saved their asses by telling them to get bent when they tried to get the Betamax banned the last time around.

"The FCC today has taken a step that will shape the future of television," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Sadly, this represents a step in the wrong direction, a step that will undermine innovation, fair use, and competition."

"The broadcast flag rule forces manufacturers to remove useful recording features from television products you can buy today," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. "The FCC has decided that the way to get Americans to adopt digital DTV is to make it cost more and do less."

Movie trailer for Disney + Baseman's "Teacher's Pet"
Walt Disney Pictures' "Teacher's Pet" trailer is now online. The feature film, based on the art of Gary Baseman, is about a talking dog who finds a way to make his dream come true to become a real, living boy. Written by Bill and Cheri Steinkellner, directed by Timothy Bjorklund, starring Nathan Lane and Kelsey Grammer. Rated PG, opens January 16th. Link, or visit Disney.com/TeachersPet.

NYC BB readers: Gary Baseman will have a personal appearance signing his NEW Japanese "Dunces" Toys at KidRobot/Soho on November 6th from 5pm to 7pm. 126 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012, 212.966.6688. (thanks, Sean)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:49:49 AM permanent link to this entry

Wi-Fi's new security standard has a weakness
BoingBoing pal Glenn Fleishman writes:

I wrote a piece yesterday for the Mac journal TidBITS about the recently released implementation of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) in the AirPort Extreme product line from Apple. WPA replaces WEP by fixing its various holes. That article drew a response from Robert Moskowitz, long-time wireless security expert, who sent me a paper and his permission to post it about a serious weakness in the consumer version of WPA: if you choose short keys that are comprised of real words, WPA keys can be easily broken through passive access to a network.

I've written this up and posted his paper here. Interestingly, the problem is all at the presentation layer, not at the encryption layer. It's a flaw with how manufacturers are offering users the chance to create and enter WPA keys, and thus could be easily fixed with a driver update -- no firmware necessary.

Announcing Link-Fu: Battle of the Bizarro URLs
OK. Listen up, freaks -- here are the rules. Link-Fu is an online competition where during a specific, pre-established period of time -- in this case, Thursday, November 6 from 9AM-12PM, Eastern Time -- you send us one url that links to some very weird something somewhere. Something so bizarre and wild and intriguing and fascinating, that no-one else (or as few nobodies as possible) has seen.

Judges: Warren Ellis, Invisible Cowgirl, Mark, Pesco, and yours truly. We declare a winner based on whatever we happen to like best. Not the grossest, not neccesarily Farkish or Rotten. Just the flat-out most bizarre -- though grotesquery is not neccesarily out of the question. In fact, here was last week's barfbag winner (WARNING: extremely distgusting, NSFW, Cowgirl found it). The winner wins the title of High Master of Link-Fu, until we hold the next battle.

So, if you'd like to compete in the website smackdown -- e-mail the funkiest, most potently bizarro url-age you can find to linkfubattle@yahoo.com on Thursday, November 6 from 9AM-12PM, Eastern Time (US). We will announce the winner Friday morning. May the best link win. (disclaimer: the whole thing was Warren and Cowgirl's idea.)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:31:38 AM permanent link to this entry

Debut of first Wired blog: Bruce Sterling, Beyond the Beyond
Now online: "Beyond the Beyond" by Bruce Sterling, the first blog launched by Wired Magazine. Forthcoming launches are said to include a Mac-related blog from veteran Wired News correspondent Leander Kahney. From the "Wired Blogs" home page:

Wired News and Wired Magazine Blogs are new features that allow our writers and readers to post their thoughts on recent developments and ideas in their corner of the Web. As a new site feature, these blogs will grow and develop into living, breathing areas for the exchange of links, thoughts, and information.

I plan to blog to this site EVERY SINGLE DAY except for weekends and major nondenominational holidays. Minor planetary calamities such as military invasions, Microsoft worms, electrical blackouts, abject market collapses, a patch of California the size of Rhode Island catching fire from climate change -- not only will these mishaps not slow me down in my blogging duties, they will probably SPEED ME UP. Note that there is NO COMMENTARY ALLOWED in my pristine, high-toned blog here. Why? Because you might be a spammer, that's why! When I have a big red anti-spam button I can push that will cause Homeland Security to arrest you immediately and deport you to Guantanamo, then you may comment. Until then, no blog-reader of mine will ever be forced to endure your lame illegal product pitches, and that goes double for you harebrained flamers and trollers.

Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: RFIDS and privacy
On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Madeline Brand about RFIDS -- radio frequency ID tags -- and the technology's potential impact on commerce and personal privacy.

Wal-Mart executives are scheduled to meet with some of their top suppliers today to establish RFID compliance standards. Participants in the meeting to be held near Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters are said to include Kraft Foods, Proctor & Gamble, Tyson Foods and Unilever. A number of large IT companies are also expected to be in town for an RFID-related tech event slated for Wednesday, including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Philips Semiconductor and SAP. Both Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense plan to require that their major suppliers implement the wireless tracking technology by early 2005 -- a move similar to Wal-Mart's push for UPC (bar code technology) some two decades ago.

Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:30:02 AM permanent link to this entry

Cool laptop bags for chicks
The "Slim," a new bag/sleeve hybrid designed specifically for G4 Apple PowerBooks and other laptops. Bag can be inserted into another bag or carried with or without the removable shoulder strap. Lots of textiles to choose from. Starts around $79. Swankolicious. Link (thanks, Clayton)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:23:16 AM permanent link to this entry

Robolympics games in SF December 13
From antweight to sumo fights, expect an overdose of robotic fun in the RSA's biannual show, including movie robots, stormtroopers, and lots of competitions. Plus, a vendor area selling cool robot stuff. link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 7:20:08 AM permanent link to this entry

Microsoft's new blogging tool
The new weblogging tool currently in development at MS Research Lab, "where you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends." Link (thanks, Jean-Luc)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 6:55:37 AM permanent link to this entry

Photographic place map
Following on the heels of this site blogged last week, another online collection of images organized by points on a map. I love how the photographer/webmaster says, "Please make the room dark and look [at] the photographs." I can't recall ever having read those instructions on a photoblog before. Link (via Cup of Chica)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 6:53:16 AM permanent link to this entry

Monday, November 03, 2003

Immersive VR Pacman
The Human Pacman: an immersive 1980s video-game experience. I'm not convinced it's not a hoax: where are the screenshots?

Human Pacman is an interactive ubiquitous and mobile entertainment system that is built upon position and perspective sensing via Global Positioning System and inertia sensors; and tangible human-computer interfacing with the use of Bluetooth and capacitive sensors. Although these sensing-based subsystems are weaved into the fabric of the game and are therefore translucent to players, they are nevertheless the technical enabling forces behind Human Pacman.

Sustainable fish wallet-card
The Monterey Bay Acquarium has produced a wallet-card that grades west-coast fish based on how environmentally sound the fishery practice is for each species. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:53:24 PM permanent link to this entry

Man drops phone in train toilet, causes big hassle
"A man riding a Metro-North train dropped his cell phone in a toilet and got his arm stuck trying to retrieve it Thursday, forcing the train to stop and delaying the evening commute for thousands of people." Link
posted by David Pescovitz at 8:06:42 PM permanent link to this entry

Johnny Meah: The Czar of Bizarre
Since the 1950s, Johnny Meah painted more than 2,000 circus sideshow banners. Here's his personal gallery of surreal canvases and writings on the carney and circus life. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
posted by David Pescovitz at 8:00:14 PM permanent link to this entry

Eno lecture in SF on Nov 14
Kevin Kelly sez,

Musician/producer BRIAN ENO will be giving a rare free public lecture next week at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 14, in the Herbst Pavillion. Coffee bar opens at 7pm, lecture at 8pm. Directions to Herbst Pavillion are here.

This is not a concert. Brian Eno will be speaking about "The Long Now." His talk will be the first of a monthly series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking, sponsored by The Long Now Foundation (http://www.longnow.org). Eno's talks are usually as amazing as his music...

Admission to the lectures is free (a $10 donation is welcome but NOT required). The hall holds about 700 people. For unticketed lectures like this it's a good idea to come early for a good seat.

EFF sues Diebold!
EFF is suing Diebold on behalf of the Online Policy Group, who are being threatened with a bogus copyright action in retaliation for linking to a website that describes the technical failings off Diebold's voting machines.

"Diebold's blanket cease-and-desist notices are a blatant abuse of copyright law," said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "Publication of the Diebold documents is clear fair use because of their importance to the public debate over the accuracy of electronic voting machines."

Diebold threatened not only the ISPs of direct publishers of the corporate documents, but also the ISPs of those who merely publish links to the documents. In one such instance, the ISP Online Policy Group (OPG) refused to comply with Diebold's demand that it prohibit Independent Media Network (IndyMedia) from linking to Diebold documents. Neither IndyMedia nor any other publisher hosted by OPG has yet published the Diebold documents directly.

"As an ISP committed to free speech, we are defending our users' right to link to information that's critical to the debate on the reliability of electronic voting machines," said OPG's Colocation Director David Weekly. "This case is an important step in defending free speech by helping protect small publishers and ISPs from frivolous legal threats by large corporations."

Liveblogging childbirth via hospital WiFi
Matt sez, "the very cool presence of wi-fi here at the hospital means that I can blog my second daughter's birth as it happens. Finally my two favorite things (my daughters and my laptop) come together!" Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 2:46:44 PM permanent link to this entry

Buddhist sanctuary mental patients
Gallery of black and white photographs of mental patients in a Taiwanese Buddhist sanctuary. Link
(via signormori.clarence.com)
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 9:08:52 AM permanent link to this entry

Gawker jumps the snark
Dude, Gawker is OVER. Not shut down, I mean, like, so OVER. As in, when New York magazine publishes a feature which includes phrases like "Gawker Explosion," "Gawker Effect," and "Gawker-fed hotness" about your site, all your je ne sais blog vanishes like a broken RSS feed in the night. (Note to God: please, please, please, don't let them ever pen so much as a word about BoingBoing, or I'll have to go back to spamming friends with lists of art-porn urls. Oh wait, I still do that! OMG! LOL!).

Still, Choire has teh funny. And Elizabeth Spiers is somehow managing to stave off the ravages of obscurity despite having turned down Jason Calacanis' infamously unrefusable offer. As for Nick Denton, the blogtrepreneur is said to be launching new sites, very soon -- the first of which is Fleshbot, a hot pink orb devoted to all things porny. Next up: A Gawker-like site focused conceptually and geographically on Hollywood, and a DC-centric blog deconstructing politics, spin, and everything else that lies inside the beltway. Link to NY Magazine hand job story. (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 9:02:07 AM permanent link to this entry

Sunday, November 02, 2003

QTVR pano of "Matrix: Revolutions" Australia premiere
QTVR enthusiast and photographer Peter Murphy says:

Hi Xeni, I shot a panorama for my blog at the premiere of Matrix Revolutions last night -- at Sydney Opera House. Keanu, Hugo Weaving, the producer ... were there. Security was tight -- only ticketed fans could watch the action.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 6:41:42 PM permanent link to this entry

Iranian cafe for bloggers
From Hossein Derakhshan's blog:

"I'm not sure if there is any Cafe for bloggers in other cities, but there is one in Tehran. Actually it's recently opened in a northern area of Tehran and Ive heard that it's quite popular among Tehranian bloggers. It's called Cafe Blog and based on the website, they held some basic technical workshops for their members. There are some photos from their opening on their website."

Link (thanks Jean-Luc)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:14:58 PM permanent link to this entry

On 60 Minutes tonight: P2P and the movie biz
Tonight, the CBS television show 60 Minutes will include a segment on digital filesharing and the film industry -- and the opportunity this industry has to avoid replicating the music industry's blunders with regard to P2P. Link
posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:07:23 PM permanent link to this entry

Mieville on Tolkien
Award-winning not-dead fantasy novelist China Mieville excoriates dead seminal fantasy novel JRR Tolkien in a most entertaining fashion:

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 9:16:44 AM permanent link to this entry

Saturday, November 01, 2003

Photo: river of blood. Bloggers ask "hoax?", Sea Shepherd responds.
In this photo shot near a Japanese fishing town, fishermen work on a boat full of just-killed dolphins, as a diver prepares to submerge into blood-filled water. Link.

UPDATE #1: Bloggers are debating whether or not this image may have been digitally manipulated to make the water appear redder. See MeFi. AP distributed the photo, but cited Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (an organization protesting dolphin killing in Japan) as the image's source.

UPDATE #2: I contacted Scott Sheckman, Communication Director for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, about the retouching allegations. He responds to BoingBoing readers here:

The color of the pictures are authentic and were not retouched in any way. The Sea Shepherd crew shot digital, film and video which was compared and authenticated by the Associated Press before they accepted the pictures. To support this statement, I refer you to this recent story by the Toronto Star which reports that AP verified the photos before distributing.

A video of the slaugher is available here. The color of the water is the result of at least 60 dolphins being bled to death in the shallow cove close to shore. The Japanese government allows the slaughter of approx. 20,000 dolphins a year in near-shore drives such as the one documented in Taiji.

One of the photographers explains that tools used to stun dolphins included sonar, and says of the images: "They really did represent very well what we'd seen with our own eyes that day.... that color is 100% accurate... It was just as horrifying as it looks. It truly is the same most unnatural colour I have ever seen. It was one of the most deep crimson reds I had ever seen... and to realize that it came from a living organic being was shocking."

UPDATE #3: Sea Shepherd president Captain Paul Watson says to BoingBoing readers:

Associated Press required an affidavit and the original pictures. You can be assured that A.P. would not have released photos without authentication. For those who persist in denying the truth about the photos, I suggest a visit to Taiji, Japan to verify the accuracy themselves. The slaughter is still going on.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 6:39:35 PM permanent link to this entry

Pornoportraiture, deconstructed: every Playboy centerfold, ever
Artist Jason Salavon created a suite of photographs which portray a mean average of every Playboy centerfold foldout for the past four decades, from 1960 through 1999. The series of composite Digital C-prints traces, meta-style, the evolution of sexually explicit popular portraiture.

Salavon "generates [and] reconfigures large collections of communal data to present new perspectives on familiar objects. Using software processes of his own design he produces compositions that are most often exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations."

Link (yes, worksafe, you prudes) (via Wiley)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 5:08:53 PM permanent link to this entry

Japan street couture snapshots
Portraits of iconoclastic Japanese street fashionistas. I really like the punk bride images (like the one at left from Meiji Jingu subway, 2001) because they remind me so much of Mexican-American gangbanger girls' street style here in Southern California. Instead of rhinestone tears, imagine black inkdrops on a young chola's cheeks.

Link (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 4:11:05 PM permanent link to this entry

New Clie: saucy little bastard
Purportedly, this is a leaked image of Sony's new Clie. It is teh sexy, at least on the surface. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 3:58:50 PM permanent link to this entry

Thom Yorke, watch out for that mile-high ice cream cone!
Hilarious story (several weeks old, sorry -- been traveling) about an experiment in which a San Francisco Bay Area 5th grade class listens to Radiohead, then draws what they hear. Some of the resulting images look like they could pass for actual Radiohead album covers. Snip:

"We will play a career-spanning selection of Radiohead songs; the kids, equipped with Sharpies and blank sheets of paper, will simply draw whatever the music suggests to them. We don't even give them the name of the band. They don't know anything about Radiohead, the mountain of criticism, the mythology. Their thoughts and interpretations are pure, unsullied, literally unique.

They are also extremely bizarre. The kids consent to this experiment, if only because [teacher] Mitsi [Kato] tells them to. They do, however, immediately request that we play Sean Paul or 50 Cent instead. 'This is not hip-hop,' Mitsi says. 'I'm not asking if you like it.' She doesn't have to ask. They don't. "

Link (Thanks, Mara!)
posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:57:25 PM permanent link to this entry

Faux stereoscopic photos: "space wiggle" Burning Man images
While it's true that a fair amount of actual wiggling takes place at Burning Man, the "space wiggle" images at this site are just a nifty optical illusion:

"This method of presenting stereo images uses animated .gifs to rapidly switch between left and right images. For most of us the brain will impose a crude sense of dimensionality on a wildly wiggling scene."

Link to smaller image size (for dialup folks), Link to larger images (for broadband gluttons). NSFW warning: includes naked (and wiggling) body parts. (Thanks, JP!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:36:13 PM permanent link to this entry

Cool way to organize travel images for online presentation
Nice UI: cartoonist/illustrator/blogger Kean organized online photos and sketches from a recent trip to NYC along the subway map. Link (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 3:19:52 PM permanent link to this entry

Illegal Art: "Sonny Bono is Dead"
Sonny Bono is in fact dead, and that is also the title of the latest compilation project from Illegal Art.

This project is a protest against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which passed through Congress in 1998 and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. This act diminished the public's ability to access older works while granting more control to corporations anxious to preserve a few copyrights from the 1920's. Copyright law continues to expand and defeat its original purpose of promoting advances in the arts and sciences. These excesses damage the evolution of our culture and only serve corporate interests.

We encourage artists to liberally sample from works that would have fallen into the Public Domain by the year 2004 had the Sonny Bono Act failed. Artists are also encouraged to create new works by sampling Sonny Bono's output (or other artists who embraced the notion of copyright lasting forever). The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2004.

SIGGRAPH call for art entries, synaesthesia is 2004 theme
A call for entries in the 2004 edition of SIGGRAPH's annual Art Gallery was issued this week.

Synaesthesia will showcase original digital art that explores new connections between the senses - the technological, the aesthetic, and the critical - and emerges from the conjunction of cybernetics and human vision, inner as well as outer.

The problem with abundance
BoingBoing pal Clayton says:

Here's an interesting piece on the unforeseen problems that can arise in modern society when previously scarce resources become commonplace... from obesity to P2P. And it kind of puts the Amish desire to "freeze" progress in a new light, as if it were the desire to blunt massive societal upheaval from new tech developments.

NYC event tonight: The Art of Gwar
Gwar, the blood-spewingest band in the history of punk/metal/comic book chic, is an ensemble of musicians, artists and performers with stage names like Oderus Orungus, Jizmak Da Gusha and Flattus Maximus. Tonight in NYC, Fuse Gallery launches an exhibit of THE "ART" OF GWAR, and a launch party takes place at Lit Lounge with a live performance by members of the band. Show runs through mid-December.

Kiss, Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson. When it comes to onstage theatricality and over the top rock and roll antics, these are the names that come to mind. However, to a loyal army of fanatical fans, known affectionately as "Slaves", none hold a candle to Gwar, the undisputed kings of the theatrical concert-performance. The Richmond, Virginia based band is infamous for their heavy but humorous music, pornographic alien-barbarian costumes and outrageous stage props which include huge squirting phalluses, rubber fetuses and gallons of stage blood.

Bluejacking: anonymous Bluetooth messaging
Bluejacking is the art of sending a message to a nearby stranger's Bluetooth phone, having first encoded the message as the "Name" field of an address-book entry, i.e., "Name: I have bluejacked you, I 0wn l0l0l0l0l." BluejackQ is a new community site for posting bluejacking experiences.

Ellie and I were just outside a shopping centre in town and she was searching for a victim near where we were sitting. She came up with a contact; some Nokia, I'm not sure which one. We found out a few minutes later that our victim (who showed an un-canny resemblance to Alan Ford) was sitting in Starbucks with his wife.

After they'd left Starbucks, we followed the couple all over town for about 30mins. He couldn't understand what was happening to him and was looking around all over the place for his bluejacker! We went up and down, around in circles, dodging his stare; quite literally, up in lifts, down on escalators!

Spidering Hacks
The latest book in the O'Reilly Hacks series, "Spidering Hacks," (written by Kevin "Morbus Iff" Hemenway and Tara "ResearchBuzz" Calishain) is out. It's the site-scraper's bible, with 100 tips and tricks for sucking in data from the Web.

Spidering Hacks takes you to the next level in Internet data retrieval--beyond search engines--by showing you how to create spiders and bots to retrieve information from your favorite sites and data sources. You'll no longer feel constrained by the way host sites think you want to see their data presented--you'll learn how to scrape and repurpose raw data so you can view in a way that's meaningful to you.

Written for developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians, and power users, Spidering Hacks provides expert tips on spidering and scraping methodologies. You'll begin with a crash course in spidering concepts, tools (Perl, LWP, out-of-the-box utilities), and ethics (how to know when you've gone too far: what's acceptable and unacceptable). Next, you'll collect media files and data from databases. Then you'll learn how to interpret and understand the data, repurpose it for use in other applications, and even build authorized interfaces to integrate the data into your own content.

Post-circuit-switched voicemail
Nice rant on how "circuit-switched" thinking is holding back advancement in telephony:

Assume a phone call requires an (extremely generous) 3Kb per second of audio. One hour of stored audio is about 10Mb of data. This is a pretty modest amount by the standards of modern flash memeory. Your mobile phone is perfectly capable of storing all your voicemail. The network is perfectly capable of transmitting the data in a sensible amount of time. Unlike email, most voicemail is listened to -- the amount of wasted download is small...

You should be able to listen to voicemails on your plane journey home. You should be able to reply to them on a store-and-forward basis, even when you're not connected to the network. And most of all, you shouldn't have to use a clunky telephony user interface to navigate a message queue. And you shouldn't be restricted to one device for accessing your own data.

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9-20-03: Read the Island Chronicle Dispatches at LA WEEKLY.

Mark and Carla are in the South Pacific! Read and see all about it on The Island Chronicles

The Guestbar! A tiny, guest-edited blog! Todd Lappin Todd Lappin is a senior editor at Business 2.0 in San Francisco. He also serves as fleet operations officer for Telstar Logistics, an imaginary supply-chain management firm that provides integrated client services by land, air, sea, and space. TUCSON II: Musings on the Mortality of Flying Machines Okay, through the good offices of Shutterfly (whose online photo-hosting service I highly recommend, BTW), I’ve compiled an album of 53 photos I took during my exploration of Tuscon’s boneyards. These pictures were taken on the grounds of the U.S. military’s AMARC aircraft-storage facility, and in several of the scrapyards that surround the AMARC compound. The photos more or less trace the path that an airplane follows as it moves from inactivity, to storage, to disposal, to cannibalization, to scrap. Be forewarned: The images may be a tad unsettling. We entrust our lives to these birds, so it can be unnerving to see them in various states of disrepair or decay… to realize that they are, ultimately, just an improbable jumble of wires, rivets, and beer-can aluminum. So, with that said, the online photo album begins here. Lastly, a word about the use of the photos… I took ‘em all, I hold all the rights, and in the spirit of the Creative Commons, I've placed all the images in the public domain. I encourage you to use/manipulate/share/exploit them as you will. Shutterfly will sell you hard-copy prints, if you’d like. Want an image to use as desktop wallpaper, the cover of your next goth-rock CD, or whatever? I’ll gladly email you a full-res digital file. (Most of the photos are around 1.1 MB.) Just tell me the file name, as shown in the slide show caption, and I’ll zap it to you poste haste. And now, we return to our regular programming… posted by Todd Lappin at 10:38:05 AM | permalink TUCSON: The Middle Earth of Arizona? I just returned from my trip to the Boneyards of Tucson, and I’m happy to report that my adventure was a great success. I mean, really, why bother with the arduous journey to Middle Earth, when Tucson offers so many equally magical spectacles… so much closer to home? To wit: During my visit, I was able to explore the Landing Gear Forest, the Propeller Garden, and the mysterious Turbine Incubation Pods. I saw the Tail Fin Can-Can, the B-1 by Christo, and the cruel wreckage left behind by the Marauding Metal Guillotines. I battled my way through the Hoardes of S2 Trackers and I paused to listen to the dolorous Weeping of Scavenged 707s. Truly, was a most excellent quest, and my head is still spinning with visions of the many wonders I witnessed. More photos to follow soon. posted by Todd Lappin at 8:32:06 AM | permalink URBAN EXPLORATION: The Ruins of Treasure Island Okay, how’s this for an unlikely scenario… Imagine a palm-lined island that sits in the middle of a beautiful harbor. Place it near a city that’s one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Picture the island as a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, full of abandoned houses, cavernous warehouses, and military ruins, all lying within plain view of the expensive city’s bustling urban center. Seem just a tad incongruous? That’s San Francisco’s Treasure Island. I look out at Treasure Island from my desk at work. As I write this now, I can clearly see the old seaplane hangars that were built to serve Pan Am Clippers en route to Hawaii and China. And I can see the former Administration Building, decorated with sculptural remnants of a grandiose World’s Fair. During World War II, Admiral Nimitz plotted naval strategy in one of the building's basement bunkers. Treasure Island was created in the 1930s. It was built from landfill, in time to play host to the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Like other World’s Fairs, the Expo was a marvel of wild architecture and exotic amusements. (Lots more great Expo pictures here.) When the Expo ended, the island was supposed to become an airport. Instead, the US government leased the land in 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor, converting it into a a naval base along the way. The Navy used Treasure Island as a training and administrative facility until 1997, at which point the military packed up and departed, leaving a lot of empty buildings behind. Treasure Island is now open to the public, and it’s a wonderfully eerie place. The old Pan American hangars are today used mainly as motion picture sound stages. (Nash Bridges, Battlebots, and The Hulk were all filmed there.) An old Navy gun turret, once used for training, remains on the lot. There’s an abandoned bowling alley, a movie theater, a shuttered Retail Store, and even a desolate miniature golf course. Row after row of bland, 1970s-era military tract housing lines the north end of the island. Some of the homes are off-limits -- built on contaminated soil, apparently. But others have been rented to hearty urban pioneers who are willing to live on an island that doesn’t even have a place to buy a quart of milk. But hey, the views are nice. What’ll happen to the place? It’s apparently unclear. For a while, there was talk of building casinos on the island, but that idea was quickly dropped. Because it’s built from landfill, the island is slowly sinking, and it’s also vulnerable to "liquefaction" during earthquakes. Other than that, it’s perfectly lovely. And it's just sitting there, all faded and forlorn, awaiting whatever comes next. posted by Todd Lappin at 12:36:50 AM | permalink IDLE PROCRASTINATION: Roll Your Own Cop Car Are you a black-and-white, or an NYPD blue? Do you fancy yourself a fire chief, or perhaps even a rent-a-cop? No matter what your preference or orientation, here’s a fun little Flash-based tool that lets you design your own emergency vehicle, starting with a cop-special Ford Crown Victoria. "Let’s be careful out there…" posted by Todd Lappin at 11:34:02 AM | permalink Guestbar Archives

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